“I buy that the Steam Deck is a less a competitor for the Switch, and more so for gaming laptops.” honestly this.
It’s ultimately perhaps closer to a PC gaming platform.... competing with PC gaming platform because PC hardware is often unstandardized as heck and cost a heck ton(because unlike consoles, buying/building…

“In short, the Steam Deck will siphon off a number of users from the Nintendo Switch, but I think the number of those users leaving the Switch is not going to be significant enough to affect Nintendo financially or influence Nintendo in introducing the next-gen console faster.”

Honestly this is my thought there. Plus…

The thing is, are Retro Gamers and the like large enough of a crowd to actually sustain this thing when it’s been reported it’s likely sold at a loss?

Honestly a lot of people blame the WiiU’s lack of success on lack of third parties but I feel it was kinda the opposite.

The WiiU launched with ONLY third party titles and absolutely none of it’s usual first party franchise.
So people who wanted third parties... often already were planning to get them on non-Nintendo…

Considering it sounds like even the 399$ model is being sold at a loss, I wonder how likely it is that this thing will ever be on sale since technically even the base price sound like it’s discounted compared to what we’d otherwise pay for the hardware :/

Yeah.
Plus as noted by others there’s one matter: the only people who know the Steam Deck even exists is the people who’re already online enough to know of Kotaku and Polygon.
Sure a lot of self-professed gamers ARE those people but the gist is we don’t get consoles selling 80+ million units on just peoples like us.

Ulti…

Honestly this keep being talked by a certain crowd as a Switch contender, but I wonder if the market that might need to worry the most might not be Xbox/Playstation.
While a lot was written about “You can play Doom Eternal on the go!”/etc, ultimately these big “AAA”-style games have never really been the ones that sold…

I dunno.

The irony with your comment is that the main character is actually part of the actual cast of one of the most renowned pre-World cast AND one of the few characters to play a role in more than a single game.

Plus this is a doozy for fans of MH4U.

“Are they just attempting to break into the handheld market? ”

The fact some people like OP still don’t realize that it CAN support show the flaw of not including it in the base package.

“If it works for Sony and Microsoft...”
Personally though I’d rather have them do a traditional console instead of something that clearly seem so targeted at the Switch.

Handheld gaming felt like the last fucking place safe from the artificial performances horserace that’s driving so many studios into fucking burnout…

Otoh this article seem to confirm the Steam Deck, even at it’s base 400$, might be selling at a loss.
I.e.: taking a loss of profit to make their mark on the market which.... sounds a lot like what people kept accusing Epic Games Store of trying to do Steam.

Which honestly... considering how burnout and overwork seem to…

Plus, honestly this remind me of all the people shitting on Epic Games for purposefully taking the “losing money because we have money to burn until we can displace the opposition enough to establish ourselves” tactic against Steam and.... honestly looking at the form factor, this feel like Steam doing *exactly just…

How would you compare the performance to the components listed for this thing?
Kind of wondering how much of a profit(or loss) they would be making with that 399$ asking price(like, iirc, a 299$ Switch would barely make a 50$ profits and that’s with relatively weak/cheap components but this seem to claim to be more…

Yeah, people go all about how “this will run a game Switch can’t” and there’s definitely a lot of hardware it has more than a Switch but then there’s stuff like... display resolution that isn’t really higher than a Switch so while it can likely run more advanced shaders/etc I don’t exactly see this running as the…

“It won’t be for me as I want to play Steam on nice beefy computer or stream the games to TV through other means. Will it be successful for Steam? We’ll see eventually.”

Honestly I feel it’s the thing there. Plus the fact it’s (currently) sold exclusively through Steam rather than the kind of retailers deals and…

Honestly I wonder how “low cost” it is. Granted though it runs a resolution barely higher than the Switch so I could be overestimating the actual “horsepower” of this thing.

But for only 100$ more than a Switch yet claims of “can run the latest AAA games, and well”, I feel that’s not a huge price increase from the…

Definitely.
Though I wonder just how much of these consoles they intend to make. If it runs the kind of stuff it claims to be able to run.... I honestly wonder what the profit margin is with the 399$ model at all.

That’s a lot of (claimed) performances for such a small package and I recall the Switch’s performance was…