What people miss about Steam Deck's "loss" to Nintendo
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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 expect the average switch user to be intelligent enough to see value in a Steam Deck.
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Do you mean the millions of available games on PC? That easily far outweighs the switch.
Oh wait, and you can play switch games on PC too.What was your point again?
That's exactly the problem... there are thousands of games but nothing stands out the way Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon do on a Nintendo platform.
I still look from time to time on my Deck. I picked up Borderlands 2 the other day because it was free.
But what I usually see browsing are a bunch of games I can already play on other systems, plus porn games, anime games, and anime porn games.
There really isn't one game that stands out on the Deck.
Vampire Survivors?
macOS, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5En Garde? PC Exclusive, decent game, but limited and a little boring if I'm being honest.
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You said PC gaming is flawed because you can’t play modern games on a Windows 95 PC. Which is insane.
I never claimed that. I said it was a limitation. Which it is. It limits its capability. Limitations are flaws, but that doesn’t make it flawed, it still works. Funny how words can have multiple definitions and you can choose which one to fit your narrative. Having to get a specific system to play the games you want, is cumbersome, it isn’t always easy, or even doable in some situations now.
Quite putting words in peoples mouth, and again with the insulting when someone has a dissenting opinion. You don’t agree with me, that doesn’t mean I’m a sock puppet. Just shows you don’t want to have a civil discourse and go to fallacies.
So yes it’s MORE exclusive in some situations.
In almost all situations.
… you agree the Pc is more limited in almost all situations now? That’s not my claim. I said some.
wrote last edited by [email protected]You know what? I just had a change of heart.
PC gaming is so much more limited compared to the Nintendo Switch 2.
You can only play on the Steam Deck. All games available on PC have to be licensed by Valve. If Half-Life is played on anything that isn’t a Steam Deck, Valve will sue you into oblivion.
If only PC gamers could play their games on the hardware of their choosing instead of that one handheld.
Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.
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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.
Has either company "lost" anything? They both seems to be raking in money quite healthily.
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Only games officially licensed by Nintendo.
Bingo. Nintendo and all game consoles are all walled gardens, but not necessarily a bad thing in this case. The Steam Deck is more of handheld PC that can pretty much run anything when in Desktop Mode. They’re two completely different beasts.
Any non modern Nintendo console is capable of playing homebrew games, so this isn’t even true.
People have released NES and gameboy games in the last few years. Even on carts.
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Exclusives are a bad thing. The fact that you're asking to be fed the same regurgitated ip slop gives them the idea that maybe, $80 games are underpriced. Maybe they can bump that up to a base $90, $100 for physical. Nintendo keeps exclusives out of greed, worse than even Sony. There shouldn't be exclusives. Ridiculous.
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?
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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?
I spent a few grand on my gaming PC. I can play those games on other hardware, but the hardware I bought plays those games the way I want to play them. The same goes for a Steam Deck compared to any other handheld gaming device.
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That's exactly the problem... there are thousands of games but nothing stands out the way Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon do on a Nintendo platform.
I still look from time to time on my Deck. I picked up Borderlands 2 the other day because it was free.
But what I usually see browsing are a bunch of games I can already play on other systems, plus porn games, anime games, and anime porn games.
There really isn't one game that stands out on the Deck.
Vampire Survivors?
macOS, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5En Garde? PC Exclusive, decent game, but limited and a little boring if I'm being honest.
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.
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Any non modern Nintendo console is capable of playing homebrew games, so this isn’t even true.
People have released NES and gameboy games in the last few years. Even on carts.
Just because Homebrew is possible doesn’t mean Nintendo intended for you to do that.
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Just because Homebrew is possible doesn’t mean Nintendo intended for you to do that.
wrote last edited by [email protected]The games released on carts arent official games, but they’re playable on an unmodified console/system. Where do the goalposts get moved to now? Games are released on something you said wasn’t possible, so which is it?
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The games released on carts arent official games, but they’re playable on an unmodified console/system. Where do the goalposts get moved to now? Games are released on something you said wasn’t possible, so which is it?
Both can be true.
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Having to buy from a certain store and being able to run anywhere on hardware of your choice is hardly more exclusive than being forced to buy from one vendor and only run on one system.
But you can’t…? It’s locked to OS, and it doesn’t run on ALL hardware. There’s minimum specs, and you can’t play modern games on windows 95.
Why do people ignore the glaring flaws while preaching the few okay ones? And the obvious lies too. The pros that people use, all fall flat when you follow them. You say all hardware, but it’s not, and never has been has it…?
There are flaws and benefits to every platform, that's why they exist otherwise only one would stand the test of time. There's a reason why PC gaming continues to march on. It has its flaws, sure, I wouldn't necessarily say glaring though.
The argument here isn't that PC gaming is flawless or you can run on literally any hardware or os, that's silly. Just that it's more flexible and open to choice. I run my Steam library on my Windows PC, Linux PC and steam deck. Games I bought a decade ago can run perfectly fine on all these configurations. That's the argument I was making and why your claim of PC being more exclusive seemed so disconnected from the reality of my experiences at least.
Still, it's not an argument to say you should use one platform or the other. Just that they are different and have their pros/cons, flexibility being a huge pro of the PC platform that's important to some people and less so for others.
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Both can be true.
How so? How can it be a walled garden if anyone can develop and release a game cartridge for it?
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That's exactly the problem... there are thousands of games but nothing stands out the way Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon do on a Nintendo platform.
I still look from time to time on my Deck. I picked up Borderlands 2 the other day because it was free.
But what I usually see browsing are a bunch of games I can already play on other systems, plus porn games, anime games, and anime porn games.
There really isn't one game that stands out on the Deck.
Vampire Survivors?
macOS, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5En Garde? PC Exclusive, decent game, but limited and a little boring if I'm being honest.
Blood, Baldur’s Gate, Septerra Core, and Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachi have all been PC exclusives for decades now.
Seriously, I got lots of great PC classics to recommend to you.
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Any non modern Nintendo console is capable of playing homebrew games, so this isn’t even true.
People have released NES and gameboy games in the last few years. Even on carts.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Ok, now suppose you want to release a game for any of the modern Nintendo consoles.
You need to get a devkit. To get it, you need Nintendo to approve your request, and you need to pay them for a license to use the devkit hardware. And, to actually use the devkit, you need a PC running Windows.
Sure, to develop a game for PC, you need a PC. But do you know what you don't need on top of that? A devkit and a Windows license.
Edit: Two downvotes in two minutes? Oh my, the sockpuppets are angry today.
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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?
If you want to play it, then you can buy any console. This creates competition, hopefully decreasing or at least maintaining prices for consumers.
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It’s funny you say this, because for 500 bucks I am actually debating between the two as my Christmas present to myself this year.
I think I’d prefer a Steam Deck for no particular reason.
️wrote last edited by [email protected]If you're comparing them, as in you don't have a strong preference for one vs the other, the Steam Deck wins hands down. You get access to a much larger library of games, repairability is awesome, and you can use it like a PC, because it is one.
The only reasonable reasons to get a Switch 2 are:
- play first party titles - even when emulators come out, the performance probably won't be there on the Steam Deck
- it's for someone who wants a very simple experience, and they're willing to pay more
- the Steam Deck is too big for you - if you have smaller hands, it could be uncomfortable
But I don't think most people will really be deciding between the two, they target very different markets.
I'll probably end up getting the Switch 2, and I have a n OG Switch and a Steam Deck.
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How so? How can it be a walled garden if anyone can develop and release a game cartridge for it?
wrote last edited by [email protected]If anyone could release a game cartridge, the GBA would have been filled with shovelware and we wouldn't need emulators. Homebrew was possible on the DS and later thanks to off-the-shelf SD cards, but that didn’t mean you were going to be suddenly granted a writable game cartridge.
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If anyone could release a game cartridge, the GBA would have been filled with shovelware and we wouldn't need emulators. Homebrew was possible on the DS and later thanks to off-the-shelf SD cards, but that didn’t mean you were going to be suddenly granted a writable game cartridge.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Anyone can release a cartridge though? This part you’re ignoring.
Why move the goalposts? You’re also now suggesting we gatekeep devs? Why is releasing something on pc fine, but wouldn’t be fine if it was “homebrew”? Because it doesn’t fit your bias?
A game release is a game release, or do these limitations only apply to one side unevenly?
Pc is FULL of shovelware, so that shouldn’t be the metric we use? Yeah?
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Anyone can release a cartridge though? This part you’re ignoring.
Why move the goalposts? You’re also now suggesting we gatekeep devs? Why is releasing something on pc fine, but wouldn’t be fine if it was “homebrew”? Because it doesn’t fit your bias?
A game release is a game release, or do these limitations only apply to one side unevenly?
Pc is FULL of shovelware, so that shouldn’t be the metric we use? Yeah?
Why do you keep insisting I’m moving the goal post? I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just pointing out the process is not easy as you claim it is.
