The fact that the Nintendos are locked down, family friendly and with a reputation of good production quality (similar to Disney), are also important points for non-nerdy parents and casual gamers who don't want to navigate the ocean of PC gaming and its risks.

I stopped buying consoles and moved pretty much exclusively to Steam because it gives me many more options. Thankfully, I don't think that's changing anytime soon. Consoles are great for some people, but I need more flexibility. I sometimes wish I could (legally) play Nintendo first party games, but it's really not that big of a deal.

Also, for what its worth, the OLED Decks literally sold out today, as in, Valve doesn't currently have any more to sell in the US.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/06/supply-chain-issues-are-making-the-steam-deck-oled-go-out-of-stock/

Also also... I realize this is a silly comparison, but the Switch 2 has not outsold all variants of the Deck, yet.

Its at about 3.5 million, Steam Deck is at about 4.5 million since 2022.

Also x3, the Switch 2 is apparently already sold out as well, as in no more units available at US retailers.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/11/nintendo-switch-console-record-sales.html

Wild the Switch 2 has nearly caught up to the Deck in less than a week.

There are millions upon millions of Mario, Link, and Pokemon fans.

There are not millions and millions of... what's the killer Steam Deck game again? Oh, right, there isn't one.

If Valve came out with Half Life 3, made it Steam exclusive and a pack in with the Deck, then it would start putting up Nintendo numbers.

I'll emulate Nintendo games till the day I die because fuck Nintendo and their greed.

Exclusives are a good thing if you want to justify a $400 hardware purchase. "What can I play here that I can't play elsewhere?"

If you can play it elsewhere, why blow $400?

Novel interactions and consistency remain a factor, though.

Xbox is essentially straight and standard, but Nintendo and Sony games often make use of controller features (gyroscope, touch, IR sensors) which, while not exactly widely utilized, allow for interesting methods of interacting with games that are not typically found on multiplatform releases that mostly support only features common between all platforms.

And with that in mind, you can safely make some of those novel interactions into core features of first party games when you can safely assume everyone is using the same input devices and has the same hardware.

This is basically a very minor nitpicky consideration, but as an example, gyroscopic aiming was born out of first-party games. If you've played a game with gyro aiming, it's very cool and nice to have, but it will never become a standard part of most third-party games if only a subset of users have hardware capable of supporting it.

But I don’t feel that Steam alone accounts for PC gaming.

If we're putting the SteamDeck against Nintendo, I'd say the natural comparison is Steam exclusives against Nintendo exclusives.

Even on my Steam Deck, I use GOG, Epic, and itch.io quite regularly.

Sure. Because it is functionally just a computer with a Valve-branded Linux distro. But there are PC games ported to Mobile. I'm not going to count all Android phones to the "PC" side of the aisle just because I can install Balatro on my OnePlus.

The whole reason the Steam Deck exists is to compete as a portable full sized hand-held console comparable to the Switch. If you're not talking about portable consoles, you're not really talking apples-to-apples. Anyone crammed into the coach end on an airplane can tell you the quality of life difference between a gaming laptop and a hand-held.

Console wars stopped being cool years ago. Everyone has their preferences and favorites, no need to shit on someone's fun because you think yours is better.

You have a fanboy perspective here. The Steam Deck's ecosystem is hardware agnostic, and to a large extent, Steam agnostic. No one game needs to "stand out" on the Steam Deck when it plays almost every video game that exists besides the ones Nintendo makes. Out of the sample size of "almost every video game", there's a high chance that there are many that are important to you and not made by Nintendo.

No shame to anyone who bought a switch 2. My partner got one during pre-sales and is incredibly happy to have gotten one, and I feel so happy for him that he gets to have some joy in his life with it. I wish you the same joy.

But I just can't get into it. I didn't grow up with nintendo so the properties really don't mean much to me. And now, I just don't think I can swallow paying hundreds of dollars to start, then another hundred dollars to get games that seemingly play the same way as they did in the last release, plus a yearly subscription for online play. You may not see what you purchased the same way, and I'm glad that it's meaningful to you even if I can't find the same meaning in it -- it's good that there exists something for everyone's niche.

I don't see why this needs to be a competition. Are there really people out there who were about to get a steam deck but decided not to in favour of a switch 2? I feel like switch owners are well aware that it's a Nintendo machine and theyre not gonna be playing a lot of their favourite out-of-franchise games on it. That's what they expect and thats what they'll likely get.

I can't imagine a point and click RPG like Baldur's Gate or Fallout 1 and 2 being remotely playable on a Steam Deck. You pretty much have to have a Mouse and Keyboard for them. The Glide Pads will only get you so far.

But most people are very nostalgic (can’t blame them, SNES to Wii Zeldas and Metroids were amazing) and have uncontrollable FOMO, which Nintendo keeps on milking even when their software and hardware is noticeably much worse than it’s competitors’.

This reads like someone who never played any of the switch titles. It's not simply nostalgia. The switch titles were objectively good despite lackluster hardware. The switch lasted for almost a decade and is still playable today. People are buying switch 2 to be able to play the Nintendo exclusives.

It's true that the hardware is largely lackluster, but especially in the case of the first party titles, and in general overall, the lackluster hardware just doesn't prevent the games from looking and running great. Nintendo invests in developers capable of running large, complex games on somewhat modest hardware.

Very doubtful tbh. You can look at HL: Alyx as an example. It sold well I'm sure, but not Nintendo level. As much as people like to belly ache about VR being too hard to get into, it's truly no more expensive than a Steam Deck if you actually bother to take more than 2 seconds to legitimately look into it.

I played Alyx on a mobile 1060 and a $300 headset and while it wasn't top of the line, it was still perfectly playable. I imagine most gamers these days have at least that, but Alyx absolutely did not sell like hot cakes. And I doubt the Steam Deck would either, even for HL3.

I ain’t paying $120 CAD per game.

You are correct. If you want Tears of the Kingdom, it is $130 ($115 plus tax). I am stunned that this is the launch price of Switch 2 games. How high will they go in the future?

The Switch 2 makes even the new ROG Ally X seem like a good deal (assuming it is around $1000 CAD), since you can just play any of your Xbox Play Anywhere games that you have acquired on sale, or have access to via Game Pass. You don't even need a subscription to access online play, and it has free cloud saves.

Fuck $80 mario you can get Garfield Kart for $5

It’s silly to compare Switch 2 sales to Steam Deck sales.

The Switch 2 is a locked-down, vertically integrated platform. There are no ROG Switch 2s. No Lenovo Switch 2s. No Switch laptops or tower PCs with discrete GPUs. If you want to play Mario Kart World, your only option is to buy a Switch 2. Period.

Steam Deck, by contrast, isn’t a platform. It’s just one hardware option—one entry point into the sprawling, open ecosystem known as PC gaming.

Every year, around 245 million PCs are shipped globally. If even 20–25% of those are gaming-focused, that’s 49–61 million gaming PCs annually. Steam Deck is a sliver of that. So of course it won’t outsell a console that’s the only gateway to a major IP.

But that’s exactly the point.

PC gaming is too decentralized for any single device to dominate. The last “PC” that did was the Commodore 64, which sold 12.5–17 million units over 12 years because it was a self-contained platform, unlike modern Windows, Mac, or Linux machines.

That the Steam Deck has sold 4 million units despite competing with every other gaming PC in existence is remarkable. It didn’t just sell—it legitimized a category. Handheld PC gaming is now a thing. That’s why Lenovo, ASUS, and MSI have followed. Even Microsoft is getting in, optimizing Windows for handhelds—something they would never have done if the Steam Deck didn't hold their feet to the fire.

So no, Steam Deck didn’t outsell the Switch 2. It didn’t need to.

It won by changing the landscape.

I don't think it would help SD sales much, either (and everyone would just play HL3 modded to run on regular PCs anyway if that happened), but Alyx is a bad comparison because the barrier to entry for VR is much higher than pretty much any other platform. It's not only expensive, but requires a large amount of room, which not everyone has to dedicate exclusively to games.

Eh, I literally played Alyx on a gaming laptop with a 1060 in front of my dining room table in no more than a 3x3 cube with a $300 headset. That is not a very high barrier to entry for existing pc gamers at least. A Steam Deck exclusive may fare a little better since it's a self contained console, but I doubt it would do that much better if VR was enough to discourage people tbh