I love my Steam Deck. It’s literally beside my hotel bed right now, while the Switch is at home with two kids under 10. But:
- the docking and detaching experience is frustrating as hell
- it is significantly heavier and yet feels more fragile.
- it has profiles but not comparably to the Switch in terms of use and UX
- and the controller experience is very hit and miss. ** It spent 2 months just literally randomly shutting off bluetooth - you had to go into desktop mode and re-enable with a Linux command until they patched it - but that’s not even it - whenever it did that, it also disabled the sticks!. ** I have multiple entries in the controllers screen - none of which can be renamed or show indicators as to which controller they are - where every now and again the Deck decides sorry, I don’t recognise that controller anymore. Please come walk across the living room and awkwardly stand in front of the telly pressing buttons on the switch to re-pair things. ** Oh and controller layout schemes are a cool and powerful feature but way too complicated for me to explain to an 8 year old.
If “I just want to pick up a controller after work and forget what Philip in Marketing said he thought the project was going to look like”, or “I want to buy games once and share them with my kids” or even “I’ll throw this in my bag to kill 20 minutes at the waiting room” are factors, the Steam Deck is very much not superior in every way.
Again. Love my Deck. Almost exclusively buy “Verified” games now. Halfway through a Nintendo game that somehow is easier for me, a software dev to find ajd emulate on Deck than on a Nintendo console. But the Switch has been a remarkable console to have in my living room. The first console I bought (actually now that I think of it, that my wife bought for me) since Wii and before that since PlayStation 2. I’m not really a console player. I have 1000+ games on Steam. Still Switch excels at many things and the sales figures should make that obvious.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The Switch starts at a lower price point, it’s available at Walmart, it’s more durable for the average child to handle, and Mario/Pokemon/Zelda are what someone like Warren Buffet might call a “brand moat”, where nothing’s really going to interfere with that business model.
Linktank@lemmy.today 1 week ago
You can play Mario/Pokemon/Zelda on the Deck.
simple@lemm.ee 1 week ago
You can do a lot of things by pirating. Most people aren’t interested in loading a Switch emulator and downloading roms.
kn33@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You can’t just pop a cartridge in or head to the eShop and download it. Most people don’t want to research and figure out emulators.
Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
While i agree, the steam deck is not only a great device but an alternative to piracy for me. I haven’t prayed a game that’s available on steam more than a handful of times and only once i didn’t buy it afterwards. With a resurrection of the demo now, I’ll play before i buy like the old days.