Isn’t the Steam Deck already a few years old now? Is this even a fair comparison?

Of course it is. If you want to buy a handheld now you want to know which one has more power, no matter when it was released.

The potential extra optimization on consoles lessens the blow of paying a bit more.

They’re roughly the same price so it’s a fair comparison

I’m not so sure about that. I feel if you already have a steam library, a pc handheld is kinda hard to beat. Depending on what you like, you might already own every game you’ll want for the Steam Deck. Even if you gotta buy everything new, Steam does sales more often and more aggressively than Nintendo.

If you’re not into paying for things, you can pirate on the Steam Deck. Who knows when the Switch 2 will be jailbroken.

For me, now that there are viable Linux Handhelds, I think I’d kind of struggle to justify one running a proprietary OS.

I’m not saying the switch 2 edition is a better deal only that it is nice to see the developers be commissioned to squeeze more power with limited hardware. Modders can do the same however there isn’t that many steam deck units to justify doing the same amount of work.

But the games aren’t the same price. And the policies ran by the companies aren’t the same. I don’t think Valve has ever said they’re going to break your steam deck if you use it in a way they haven’t deemed fit. And I’d question if you can mod games on the switch, like even games that normally support it.

Oh yeah, I was thinking way more generally for some reason. I can certainly see that in isolation.

Except there are enough units out there that developers have been optimizing there games for the steam deck… They’re many games that have gone from playable to verified and work significantly better due to the developers prioritizing make the game more optimized on the deck.

Looks more like a DSSL testing (which had dedicated cores/hardware) rather the actual potential. Also, one single title, wake me when there’s a test to match everything SteamDeck can emulate (Switch 1 too)

Until end of 2026 and the release of Deck 2, Switch 2 will be in a bit better position. Value remains on Steam Deck though.

If you had watched the video you would see the Nintendo switch is much more energy efficient… The steam deck doesn’t win in every single way even if we may want it to.

Energy efficiency is not at all related to game optimization and how well it runs. Atleast in this sense.

When the software isn’t efficient that’s bad coding(not in this case), it has absolutely everything to do with optimization. No one is going to say a game is well-optimized if it drains your battery in 5 minutes. You need to have nuance and admit when your favorite thing doesn’t win every in every metric. Lemmy has a steam deck circlejerk refusing to acknowledge that other handhelds may be better in some ways this is coming from someone would gladly to pick the SD over everything else.

I would love to know which games the deck and the Nintendo can both run and the Nintendo beats it at energy efficiency. Generally speaking you’re not playing the game games on either device.

Oh good for you though, it wins 1 metric out of all the other advantages that a steam deck has, and is 3 years older

The Switch 1 and 2 are kind of unbeatable in power efficiency, and I’m not surprised a port of CP2077 is running better on the Switch 2 than on the Steam Deck. I wish they used a better screen and bigger battery out the gate with the Switch 2, but there will no doubt be a mid gen refresh with those things.

I think if you have a lot of money for buying games that are only going to work on one system, the Switch 2 is a better product for people that want a system that just works out the box. Steam Deck is for people with patience and an existing library.

The best part when I bought my steam deck is that I already had 850 games where a majority of them work on it and it didn’t cost me anything extra.

And the steam deck 3 will support those games

I mean these comparisons are always a bit redundant to me. I get multiplatform games like that on steam, I use switch for Nintendo games and other casual stuff that I prefer to play handheld and are not super resource hogs.

The only people that this would affect are the extreme edge case where you have no PC or gaming laptop or Xbox/PS but have both a deck AND a switch 2 AND you don’t care about the price difference and you really want the best handheld performance.

All fair points but most Nintendo people have other priorities.

There space for everyone but yeah personally fuck Nintendo and rest of them corpos.

I am sure steam will enshitify one day too