Nintendo Co. has asked suppliers to produce as many as 25 million units of the Switch 2 by the end of March 2026, setting the company up for record first-year sales of a console that’s already reached high-water marks for the global gaming sector.
I don’t think it is, it’s $500 w/ Mario Kart, $450 without, and if we compare to the Steam Deck at $400, it has:
better screen resolution, faster refresh rate, and a larger screen (almost an inch bigger)
is lighter, thinner, and overall smaller
has better performance, at least in Cyberpunk 2, with generally better graphics
plays Nintendo first-party games
The Steam Deck has been the handheld to beat. Some are faster, but no PC handheld is anywhere near the Steam Deck in terms of value (price for performance). The Switch 2 beats it in performance, and is a similar price, which is pretty awesome.
The games, however, are really expensive, but we’re talking about hardware value here.
Fair points, but I’d argue to the contrary in light of the following:
The steam deck was developed and released at the beginning of 2022. That’s a ~3.5 year difference in hardware and what was considered good value. (As a person buying a lot of hardware I might be a tad biased on this point so I acknowledge it)
I did hear mixed things about the screen itself from a friend that has it, heard that it’s extremely scratch prone and that the battery doesn’t hold on for very long, but maybe that depends on the title you’re playing, the brightness and refresh rates.
it can do 120hz, which is nice, but that’s game dependent and there’s no guarantee that it’s implemented or enabled for every game. From what I read previously, cyberpunk only does 30-40 fps on switch2 so that’s pretty much entirely out of the question for that title at least. I won’t make any guesses or misleading statements about other titles since I haven’t seen the benchmarks and haven’t been following the news on those.
the fact that it’s robust and convenient to use in your hands is a perk imo, not a demerit, perhaps this is something more catered to the younguns which I don’t wholly understand though.
also in regards to the above point, the controllers, albeit a little larger now, are still pretty bad and still experience the same issues as the previous generation thereof) subpar mechanism, no upgradeability, and no repairability besides having to send it to a repair center/replacement. Meanwhile should you experience any issues with your deck, the instructions and parts to fix it are available on the ifixit website at extremely reasonable prices should you wanna do it yourself.
performance… I haven’t tried cyberpunk on my deck, so I can’t really comment on it specifically, but as far as a good chunk of the 100+ games that I’ve played on it are concerned, it’s been running extremely well in all aspects of the games, even the ones that weren’t fully steam deck verified… meanwhile even first party games like DK have lag spikes when you open the map on the latest and greatest… to me, that’s unacceptable.
and while I understand the premise of people wanting to play first party games from Nintendo, similar to the above point the quality has been going downhill, and some of the newer IPs (Nintendo and even Sony) are being developed as more of cross platform release or ported to pc eventually (often with enhancements, optimizations and bug fixes)
I am going to briefly mention the subscription requirement for Nintendo online, some switch 2 versions of the games costing extra vs the switch 1 versions, as well the exorbitant prices (and lack of discounts even down the road) for any games sold on their store, and the fact that if you want to tinker with any of that, you can get hardware banned from online services entirely.
These are, as you mentioned, not hardware related, but are still quite hefty anti consumer practices and while not the main topic of the above hardware discussion, should carry a lot of weight in the decision to buy into that ecosystem.
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Note that “a lot better hardware” is still hella mediocre given the price tag.
I don’t think it is, it’s $500 w/ Mario Kart, $450 without, and if we compare to the Steam Deck at $400, it has:
The Steam Deck has been the handheld to beat. Some are faster, but no PC handheld is anywhere near the Steam Deck in terms of value (price for performance). The Switch 2 beats it in performance, and is a similar price, which is pretty awesome.
The games, however, are really expensive, but we’re talking about hardware value here.
Fair points, but I’d argue to the contrary in light of the following:
I am going to briefly mention the subscription requirement for Nintendo online, some switch 2 versions of the games costing extra vs the switch 1 versions, as well the exorbitant prices (and lack of discounts even down the road) for any games sold on their store, and the fact that if you want to tinker with any of that, you can get hardware banned from online services entirely.
These are, as you mentioned, not hardware related, but are still quite hefty anti consumer practices and while not the main topic of the above hardware discussion, should carry a lot of weight in the decision to buy into that ecosystem.