It’s natural to compare the Steam Deck to Nintendo Switch. The Switch is the only major handheld on the market right now, and while Nintendo has just announced a new version in the Switch OLED, it fell short of many people’s expectations of what a new Switch model should look like - even though it’s pretty much exactly what we were promised.
Although the Switch OLED isn’t a Switch Pro, whatever you had convinced yourself a Switch Pro was, Valve’s new Steam
Deck essentially is. Aside from some surface level similarities though, the two machines and their respective audiences couldn’t be more different.
“The Steam Deck is the Switch Pro I was waiting for,” I’ve heard some people say, both seriously and in jest. We even wrote about it. Here’s the thing though; I’m not sure that many people are waiting for a Switch Pro. The news cycle has been ‘Switch Pro this’ and ‘Switch Pro that’, but that’s because no one is going to write a news story about little old Cian in Dublin who's just fine with his regular Switch the way it is, thank you very much. Except us, I guess - we wrote an editorial about that too.
It will be interesting to see how Nintendo reacts, although I can’t help but feel its reaction will be ‘do nothing’. The company has just announced a new model, and I can’t see it scrambling to produce a third version (fourth if you include the Switch Lite) in the wake of the Steam Deck.
A few people use the Nintendo Switch for handheld versions of PC titles in order to take advantage of the portability. Hades was one of my most played Switch games last year, and I spent a good chunk of that time playing in bed in the morning or evening. I also picked up Persona 5 Strikers on Switch earlier this year, twice bitten by the base game’s lack of ability to freely save. I’m sure everyone has their own version of this - buying a non-Nintendo game on Switch after playing on PC for a while and deciding it would be best to play in handheld mode.
But by ‘everyone’ I mean ‘everyone reading this’, and by virtue of actively reading a gaming website (unless you stumbled here thinking we were TheFramer, a site specialising in picture frames), you’re a more hardcore gamer than the average Nintendo Switch owner. The Switch thrives on the casual market, and while more hardcore players do own them - and may jump ship to the Steam Deck - Nintendo is unlikely to be too worried.
It’s also worth pointing out that the Switch’s primary function is not to allow Persona 5 Strikers to be played in handheld mode. Of the 30 best selling Switch games, there are only three that are available elsewhere; the highest being Monster Hunter Rise (which is still a Switch exclusive until 2022 anyway) in 15th place, while Among Us and Minecraft make up the rest of the trio. Add the sales of those three games together and you’d come out at 12th on the list, with 11 Nintendo Switch exclusives outselling the three of them combined.
The Switch is a Nintendo machine made to sell Nintendo games. It would be brilliant if a 4K Switch with double the battery life, haptic controls, and the loading times of the PS5 came out, but the games that would see the benefits of these upgrades would be Breath of the Wild, Animal Crossing, and Mario Kart. It’s a machine made for exclusives, and while the pandemic meant 2020 didn’t bring too many of them, Nintendo’s strategy remains clear - the Switch OLED has not been made to try and ensnare PC players, it’s been made to get current Switch players to double down, to try and end calls for an upgraded model by extending the console’s overall life cycle; a smart move given how successful it has been. Still no Joy-Con drift fix, though.
I doubt there are many people cancelling their OLED pre-orders to pick up a Steam Deck instead; while both are handheld machines and share some games, they’re very different. This is not 7Up and Sprite, this is Black Cherry Flavoured White Claw and Sprite. They look the same and come in similar packaging, but they offer very different experiences. I don’t think many people are making the jump from Sprite to White Claw any time soon.