As we’ve all been made plenty aware, Valve’s Steam Deck was recently announced, and reservations went up for grabs. After a bit of a fiasco when the reservations went live—what with people being informed that their Steam accounts were “too new” years after having the same one—many people were able to get their hands on a preorder slot. We even got to read a bit about the numbers behind the sales, with the vast majority of reservations coming from North America.
One of the ongoing concerns raised regarding the Steam Deck though is that it could potentially make the Nintendo Switch obsolete. Seeing as how both are handheld devices, and that the Nintendo Switch has been out for some time now, it’s possible that the Steam Deck could dominate the market.
However, in a recent interview with IGN, Valve designer Greg Coomer explained that the Steam Deck’s target audience is not the same as that of Nintendo Switch. His explanation is as follows:
We tried to make all the decisions really in Steam Deck that targeted that audience and that served the customers that were already having a good time interacting with the games that are on that platform, on our platform. That really was how we were making our decisions. We've ended up with a device that cosmetically shares some traits with a Switch, but that just was... it's kind of an artifact of how we've proceeded down the design direction.
We also know that Valve is looking into putting games on SD cards so that the Steam Deck could have physical media as well as digital. This could be a game changer for the Steam Deck, so we're anxious to see if this will turn out to be the case. It was also previously detailed how the SD card can be used to provide your Deck with a removable Steam library, so you’d be able to slot in dozens of games at a time.