Much as I hate Nintendo now, their contribution to gaming can’t be denied. First they revived it from the crash in 1983, then they showed that there’s a market for a hybrid console/handheld device, paving the way for PC handhelds.
Heck a lot of “gimmicks” nintendo was mocked for ended up copied by sony and microsoft. The only reason nintendo is like it is now is cause of copying back the bad practices sony and microsoft pioneered like paying for server connectivity and games not fully being on the physical media that you buy.
I don’t know how much of that was needing to prove that the market existed rather than the simultaneous development of performant and power efficient x64 APUs suitable for handheld gaming PCs. The 3DS was plenty successful even at the time, but handheld-only games had a reputation for being the B game to the home consoles’ A game. It was a pretty natural conclusion for Nintendo, when their handheld was successful and their home console was not, to combine the two, using the same tech found in cell phones, no less.
Hard to say for sure without seeing a timeline where Nintendo didn’t make a hybrid console and seeing if the Steam Deck and other PC handhelds still happened the same way. I’d be surprised if the success of the Switch had absolutely nothing to do with the Steam Deck’s creation, however.
Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.
I wouldn’t consider the GPD Win in the same category because it was not designed to easily switch between being hooked up to a big screen or used portably. It’s a palmtop computer with a controller embedded in it, not a hybrid. Being able to hook it up to a screen is an afterthought.
Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.
It didn’t come with one, no, but plenty are available and I use mine just like a Switch with no problems. From plenty of experience having to fiddle with running laptops on bigger screens, it shows when a device was made with seamless screen switching in mind. I don’t have experience with the other popular PC handhelds - are they as easy to swap between big screens and portable as the Switch or Steam Deck? My assumption is that they all have that in mind, but maybe they don’t.
They’re as good at it as the operating system is, if you think about any time you’ve ever plugged an external monitor into a laptop. There is some Valve special sauce in the software to help with that on Steam Deck, but I don’t think it’s something that would have gone uninvented without the Switch.
Performance is really a key factor, and gives rise to now being a time when truly competitive handheld is possible. Like this chart shows, there was a quadrupling of power between 2016 and 2020, but only a doubling of power between 2020 and 2023, with stagnation for the last couple years, largely due to technical limitations. RAM and storage have also seen massive boosts followed by stagnation, as well as a closing of the bandwidth gap between RAM and storage (from about 6 orders of magnitude to 3 orders of magnitude difference with solid state storage). The GPU front is still increasing in performance, with more watts and/or transistors giving more power, with raw performance increasing by a factor of 8 over 10 years.
Now you take those base values for performance, and a few things come together. First, storage has become low-energy, and is more performant, especially in the mobile market. Second, lower power CPUs are reasonably competitive, which means longer battery run time at an acceptable performance level. Third, while there is a bigger gap on GPU performance, smaller screens mean fewer pixels to drive so something a little older and less power hungry can still give satisfactory results. Put those all together, coupled with the steady and constant improvements in battery performance over the last 30 years, and you can make an acceptable mobile computer platform with decent results that’s able to play all but the most demanding of games from the last few years. Certainly, you can’t compete with the power of a desktop gaming PC, but you can get good enough. And then, with a few design tweaks, you can get a little better.
So, until and unless serious changes happen in the CPU or GPU market, mobile PC gaming has a chance to be good enough for a lot of people. I currently do over 90% of my gaming on the Steam Deck, but I’m also aware that I have little interest in playing the newest game as soon as it comes out so the Steam Deck is particularly suited to my tastes.
There’s a massive catalog of 3ds exclusives and those drove the market, not the adaptations or ports. The latter were the minority and not even the most popular titles.
Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console’s Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild. Plus Sony’s catalog had this problem even more visibly on Vita.
4.26 million copies sold, 17 best game awards and critical acclaim as the fourth best game for the 3DS disagree. The game also predates Breath of the wild by four years. I don’t know anyone else who compares the two directly. The LoZ games had always, until the Switch, been defined as existing in two distinct lines, the handheld games and the console games. I was thinking more of games like Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater, Ocarina of Time, Splinter Cell, The Sims, or Resident Evil Revelations who were more direct ports. And that’s even with a caveat, as RER was released for 3DS first then ported to consoles, and other ports were purpose made remakes that conserved the gameplay loop but were otherwise heavily adapted.
The 3DS has more that 1800 games, and most of them are exclusives.
You’re making an argument that I am not. I never said the 3DS or its games weren’t successful; in fact, I said it was more successful than the Wii U, which likely led to the Switch being a logical thing for Nintendo to do. I never said its biggest games were ports. But while that 4.26M copies is no slouch, it’s in line with how Echoes of Wisdom or the remake of A Link to the Past have performed and not the 30M+ copies that Breath of the Wild sold. The former have smaller budgets and less mass market appeal (though it would be wildly impressive for just about any other series). They are the B games to Breath of the Wild’s or Tears of the Kingdom’s A games. That’s what handheld libraries typically were, especially up until the point that it was clear that the Wii U was a dud.
To use another example that will maybe help convey my point better: The 3DS got Hey! Pikmin. The Wii U got Pikmin 3.
Much as I hate Nintendo now, their contribution to gaming can’t be denied. First they revived it from the crash in 1983, then they showed that there’s a market for a hybrid console/handheld device, paving the way for PC handhelds.
Heck a lot of “gimmicks” nintendo was mocked for ended up copied by sony and microsoft. The only reason nintendo is like it is now is cause of copying back the bad practices sony and microsoft pioneered like paying for server connectivity and games not fully being on the physical media that you buy.
The loss of Reggie and Iwata are sorely felt. Nintendo is just run by generic corporate suits now, and it really shows.
I don’t know how much of that was needing to prove that the market existed rather than the simultaneous development of performant and power efficient x64 APUs suitable for handheld gaming PCs. The 3DS was plenty successful even at the time, but handheld-only games had a reputation for being the B game to the home consoles’ A game. It was a pretty natural conclusion for Nintendo, when their handheld was successful and their home console was not, to combine the two, using the same tech found in cell phones, no less.
Hard to say for sure without seeing a timeline where Nintendo didn’t make a hybrid console and seeing if the Steam Deck and other PC handhelds still happened the same way. I’d be surprised if the success of the Switch had absolutely nothing to do with the Steam Deck’s creation, however.
Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.
I wouldn’t consider the GPD Win in the same category because it was not designed to easily switch between being hooked up to a big screen or used portably. It’s a palmtop computer with a controller embedded in it, not a hybrid. Being able to hook it up to a screen is an afterthought.
Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.
It didn’t come with one, no, but plenty are available and I use mine just like a Switch with no problems. From plenty of experience having to fiddle with running laptops on bigger screens, it shows when a device was made with seamless screen switching in mind. I don’t have experience with the other popular PC handhelds - are they as easy to swap between big screens and portable as the Switch or Steam Deck? My assumption is that they all have that in mind, but maybe they don’t.
They’re as good at it as the operating system is, if you think about any time you’ve ever plugged an external monitor into a laptop. There is some Valve special sauce in the software to help with that on Steam Deck, but I don’t think it’s something that would have gone uninvented without the Switch.
Performance is really a key factor, and gives rise to now being a time when truly competitive handheld is possible. Like this chart shows, there was a quadrupling of power between 2016 and 2020, but only a doubling of power between 2020 and 2023, with stagnation for the last couple years, largely due to technical limitations. RAM and storage have also seen massive boosts followed by stagnation, as well as a closing of the bandwidth gap between RAM and storage (from about 6 orders of magnitude to 3 orders of magnitude difference with solid state storage). The GPU front is still increasing in performance, with more watts and/or transistors giving more power, with raw performance increasing by a factor of 8 over 10 years.
Now you take those base values for performance, and a few things come together. First, storage has become low-energy, and is more performant, especially in the mobile market. Second, lower power CPUs are reasonably competitive, which means longer battery run time at an acceptable performance level. Third, while there is a bigger gap on GPU performance, smaller screens mean fewer pixels to drive so something a little older and less power hungry can still give satisfactory results. Put those all together, coupled with the steady and constant improvements in battery performance over the last 30 years, and you can make an acceptable mobile computer platform with decent results that’s able to play all but the most demanding of games from the last few years. Certainly, you can’t compete with the power of a desktop gaming PC, but you can get good enough. And then, with a few design tweaks, you can get a little better.
So, until and unless serious changes happen in the CPU or GPU market, mobile PC gaming has a chance to be good enough for a lot of people. I currently do over 90% of my gaming on the Steam Deck, but I’m also aware that I have little interest in playing the newest game as soon as it comes out so the Steam Deck is particularly suited to my tastes.
There’s a massive catalog of 3ds exclusives and those drove the market, not the adaptations or ports. The latter were the minority and not even the most popular titles.
Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console’s Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild. Plus Sony’s catalog had this problem even more visibly on Vita.
4.26 million copies sold, 17 best game awards and critical acclaim as the fourth best game for the 3DS disagree. The game also predates Breath of the wild by four years. I don’t know anyone else who compares the two directly. The LoZ games had always, until the Switch, been defined as existing in two distinct lines, the handheld games and the console games. I was thinking more of games like Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater, Ocarina of Time, Splinter Cell, The Sims, or Resident Evil Revelations who were more direct ports. And that’s even with a caveat, as RER was released for 3DS first then ported to consoles, and other ports were purpose made remakes that conserved the gameplay loop but were otherwise heavily adapted.
The 3DS has more that 1800 games, and most of them are exclusives.
You’re making an argument that I am not. I never said the 3DS or its games weren’t successful; in fact, I said it was more successful than the Wii U, which likely led to the Switch being a logical thing for Nintendo to do. I never said its biggest games were ports. But while that 4.26M copies is no slouch, it’s in line with how Echoes of Wisdom or the remake of A Link to the Past have performed and not the 30M+ copies that Breath of the Wild sold. The former have smaller budgets and less mass market appeal (though it would be wildly impressive for just about any other series). They are the B games to Breath of the Wild’s or Tears of the Kingdom’s A games. That’s what handheld libraries typically were, especially up until the point that it was clear that the Wii U was a dud.
To use another example that will maybe help convey my point better: The 3DS got Hey! Pikmin. The Wii U got Pikmin 3.