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What people miss about Steam Deck's "loss" to Nintendo (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
202 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (20 children)

able to run anywhere on hardware of your choice i

So if this statement is true, an OS wouldn’t be a limitation.

Of course tech is better, that’s why you can’t play on it anymore with anything modern. Do you seriously need this pointed out?

And lots of old windows 95 programs don’t run on modern hardware, so if you bought something back then, you’re SOL with modern hardware. Limitations everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (19 children)

I’m not the OP, but the original statement wasn’t that you can run on all hardware—but rather the hardware of your choice.

There are many, many different PC models available, with a variety of form factors, with vastly different components. And you can choose whatever gives you value.

Nobody is claiming that you should run Black Myth Wukong on an old IBM Aptiva except you.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (18 children)

Right, but it’s not freedom, when it doesn’t run on everything. You need to keep your system updated to play modern games.

With a switch, any game released, you know will play.

So yes it’s MORE exclusive in some situations.

Nobody is claiming that you should run Black Myth Wukong on an old IBM Aptiva except you.

Where? Don’t put words in peoples mouth if you want to have a civil discourse, but of course with this being your post, we know your bias already.

The thing you are arguing for, literally has a list of games it CANT run… and it includes a lot of modern games as well as older, so it can’t even run them… nice non-exclusion eh? It limits on BOTH sides.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's not a sock puppet, [email protected] just happens to agree wholeheartedly with SchmidtGenetics and downvote/upvote the same comments a couple minutes after they do. /s

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Funny how month long idle accounts come out as well on those same votes, what does any of it imply?

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