The Steam Deck is not a Nintendo Switch Competitor.
Similar price, same form factor. Very different philosophies.
On July 15, 2021, Valve, the company behind many popular games and more importantly the beloved PC gaming marketplace Steam, announced their next major hardware release: The Steam Deck. It’s a handheld console, or as PC enthusiasts would say, a handheld gaming PC. With the only other major brand in this space being Nintendo with their Switch devices, comparisons were drawn.
I want to make a case against those arguments. They might be the similar devices in many ways, but the philosophy difference makes them very different.
Launched in early 2017, the Nintendo Switch has sold more than 100 Million units worldwide. That’s 100,000,000. Not a number to cough at. To say that is a market favorite would be an understatement. There’s many things that make it stand out.
One can take it anywhere and play their heart out. A smartphone SoC ensured decent battery life and performance for the time. But the main reason anyone ever bought a Nintendo console was not for the hardware but the games.
Nintendo’s games have been iconic. From Mario to Animal Crossing to Pokémon to Zelda, they own the IP to some extremely popular games. These games are artistic, unique in their gameplay and extremely polished. Auteur-based, visionary games make them stand apart from the pack.
But there’s a darker side to Nintendo’s approach to gaming. They have always been single-platform, closed games. Their games have always been extremely tied to their hardware which has never been their strong suit. They argue that when you buy one of their games, you are licensing it to play on the hardware you buy it with/for.
Nintendo hates the emulation community. No, not pirates. Legal ROM owners who just wish the fire up the game on other, non-Nintendo hardware sometimes to extract extra performance and mostly due to the older hardware being both outdated and often damaged beyond repair, are often caught in the crosshairs of the brand. They love to leverage the American DMCA, a document so anti-consumer it probably needs its own article, to take down guides, references and showcases of such ideas.
Valve also makes games. Some of their most popular ones have been cult favorites like Team Fortress, Half Life, Counter-Strike, DOTA, Portal amongst others. But Valve’s claim to fame in the modern PC gaming market has been their marketplace Steam, which averages around 69 Million daily users. It’s one of the most feature rich storefronts with the largest catalog in the space.
Valve has been rather OSS supportive. OSS stands for Open Source Software, which opensource.com defines as “software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance”. Valve’s GitHub page is full of some well documented software. Open Source not only lets people see the source code, but it lets them make their own contributions to it, which, once verified by the publisher, can be added to the source code and actually serve as an addition to value.
Valve has dabbled with hardware quite often, with experimental products such as Steam PCs, the Steam Controller, and more market-oriented products like the Valve Index, but nothing as aspirational or aggressively priced as the Steam Deck. It has not been the first to make a handheld gaming PC, and it’s definitely not the last. But it’s unique in many ways.
The very basic difference in philosophy of Nintendo and Valve is control and choice. Nintendo makes every choice for you, from input to output. Valve lets the user make the choice. This makes them much more different than one would expect!
The Controls
The immediately apparent difference is in the controls.
Nintendo’s games are specifically designed for the controls provided, and vice versa. Two joysticks, A/B/X/Y buttons, directional buttons, +/- buttons, L/R buttons and ZL/ZR buttons, designed around those games. This can be solely for optimizations' and I don’t have any complaints about this. It qualifies as artistic choice but is just reflective of the control they like to have.
The Steam Deck on the other hand is absolutely laden with input options. The fairly standard combination of two joysticks, A/B/X/Y buttons, a D-Pad, L1/R1, and L/R analog triggers but adding to that, two 32.5mm, square haptic trackpads, and four assignable grip buttons on the system’s back. Not to mention the fact that you can add a mouse/keyboard while on the Switch, you need a dock to get the same.
Nintendo’s control here can be solely for optimization and I don’t have any complaints about this. It qualifies as artistic choice but is just reflective of the control they like to have.
The Operating System
This is probably the region where the two diverge in terms of functionality.
The Switch runs Nintendo’s own proprietary OS on a FreeBSD kernel. This limits the user to functionality only Nintendo allows, including a 4+ year gap from product release to Bluetooth earphone support. Settings and other basic hardware functionality ends up restricted too. The versions in the first year, however, had an unlockable bootloader that allowed a user to install a custom OS of choice, including Android, onto their Switches. This functionality was removed from any future models.
The Steam Deck runs SteamOS 3.0, based on Arch Linux. It’s completely free and open source, and while Steam says they’re working on a version for public deployment, due to the very nature of being available to everyone, a limited-hardware public version is already out, under the Holo ISO project. Being based on Arch also makes it extremely lightweight, and extremely moddable. A user can tune almost everything to their liking, which people have used to juice out every bit of performance and efficiency from the device. YouTube and other social platforms are full of guides on how to tune the device to one’s liking, something not offered by most other popular consoles. For game support, games that are not Linux native are run through a compatibility tool called Proton, which is also completely open source! You can also install any software of your choice on it!
The Repairability
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act says that the burden of warranty lies on the manufacturer, and they must prove that a user’s modification has resulted in damage to the device.
Nintendo does not make spare parts available, and any fiddling with the device results in a voided warranty. This is especially infuriating for most gamers considering Nintendo’s notorious reputation for joycon drift, an issue that causes the analog sticks on the controllers to randomly move around and input commands to the console, even when they’re not being physically moved. While they have opened a portal for addressing these issues under warranty for free, it is still proprietary to Nintendo in the regions they serve, which are very limited. And if you’re not under warranty, you can expect to pay upwards of $40 for a repair. So… if your Switch breaks or has defects, buy a new one.
Valve, on the other hand, makes parts and guides available for the entire product range, and has even designed the device in such a way that it can be easily repaired! This is revolutionary, but it should not be. A consumer pays for ownership of the device, and kudos to Valve for setting up a robust program to ensure customers’ right to repair. I would, however, like to see them extend this to schematics in the future as well!
Nintendo hates Emulation
As iterated earlier, Nintendo does not sell you games. They license you games to run on their own hardware. This is extremely misleading in many ways, since most marketing will only ever say “buy”, not “license”. Ever since the Steam Deck has launched, it has been a ripe ground for Switch emulation due to its unparalleled versatility in both software support and input choices.
Nintendo has been clearly irked by this, taking down emulation guides and gameplay videos of their games running on the Deck. It is, however, encouraging that bigger channels like Linus Tech Tips have taken the challenge to Nintendo regarding this.
Conclusion
Valve is not a white knight. They’ve had their own issues, including the 30% cut they take from developers, but the thing that sets them apart is standing up for a buyers’ ownership of devices.
Nintendo is conservative with their approach as a brand, and quite aggressive in their pursuit of complete control of the device even after sale. While some of it is to ensure a good experience for the user, and that is always appreciated, a lot of it seems excessive with the obvious motive being profit.
This saddens me. I’ve only played a few Nintendo games, but I’ve grown up hearing praises of Mario, Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing, and Smash. These are games made with passion, with a creative vision and masterful execution. Gameplay is an experience, and an exquisite one at that. To see it tarnished by greed just sucks the joy from the experience.
Nintendo could learn a lesson from a Valve in being a bit more open, and I’m sure a lot of consumers like me would be open to buying their products in the future!
