Similarities need not be ignored – just the asininely limited fan vocabulary that has no words beyond “clone” for the features Nintendo Switch’s soon-to-be-five years in the market have clearly been noticeable enough to put on more people and companies’ radars. And again, even the price (at least the base model’s, but SSDs are synonymous to premium anyway) is pretty damn competitive in the device’s niche.
Nintendo has nothing to worry about, and I don’t even mean first party exclusives – like I said, these ARE different niches. Consoles gonna console, and Switch’s flexibility remains nonpareil among them; Steam Deck is a self-admitted computer running on a PC-shared OS and meant to launch PC games none of which (barring maybe some Valve produce) are expected to be optimized for it alone (I still have flashbacks about Song of Memories, a visual novel whose cancelled Switch port led me to try wishlisting the game on Steam… and be greeted by recommended “16 Gb RAM”… but hey, maybe Steam Deck was born exactly to conquer this beast?). But it still looks like a potent and relatively affordable micro PC which can grant decent portability to many older titles not on Switch – or on [modern] consoles at all, for that matter – and provide legit offline alternatives to Switch’s own cloudlings until the eventual successor can accommodate those without streaming. From OG Assassin’s Creed (jury’s still out on how much of its existence Ubisoft even remembers), TES Oblivion and Flatout to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Control and Plague Tale – the power not to challenge Switch in the eyes of fully employed old nerds like myself, but to aid and complement it. And that’s before people inevitably start putting emulators on this thing – imagine a finally portable Xenosaga trilogy… and not for $700+ at that?!
@Longondo to each their own, Dishonored is already in my Steam library, but unless Bethesda has a funny idea like dragging it to the cloud (which the first game certainly shouldn’t require), I’d still double-dip on Switch even if I had a Steam Deck. I mean, I’m the same fruitcake who double-dips on the Switch ports of his handheld library items like WoFF and Iconoclasts.
@riki_sidekicks the catch is the same for all gaming micro PCs – in spite of the “gaming” modifier induced by the form factor and button layouts, it’s still a general PC build for PC ports. How much of your Steam library will run and/or control well on it, only practical case-by-case experience will ultimately know. All Switch games, regardless of optimization success or SNAFU, are games someone sat down and worked to run and be controlled on Switch – even most memetic exceptions only prove the rule. And this, in all fairness, is a general console perk people come to expect over PCs, especially those of us not necessarily blessed with the Master Race’s master budgets.