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The Deck is targeted squarely at enthusiasts. While it’s a fantastic product for that niche, anyone who thinks it’s going to capture a market the size of Nintendo’s any time soon is living in a fanboy bubble.
Hell, right now Valve isn’t even capable of manufacturing half as many Decks as Nintendo will manufacture Switch 2s. They literally can’t sell that number because they can’t produce that number.
Maybe it’s from huffing too much copium; but I think that Valve’s eventual Steam Deck successor will probably have mainstream console levels of appeal.
By that point in time, compatibility should be nigh-sorted (thanks to all the hard work currently happening), and users won’t need to interact with the Linux desktop mode at all. It would be completely transparent, and only enthusiasts and power-users would ever want interact with it.
The biggest thing going for the SteamOS platform is the immense library that it brings forward; no other console can compete with — even with full backwards compatibility (which even the Switch2 is struggling with).
Also Lenovo is releasing a legion go that ships woth steam os. Thay will help push steam os development and adoptions.
Probably not the Steam Deck successor alone, but the PC handheld ecosystem as a whole might be able to get there at some point (preferably mostly running Linux).
Though it’s kind of insane how much progress was already made over one generation: It went from a Kickstarter grift (Smach-Z), to the Steam Deck, to multiple competitors already.
Eventually, perhaps. I do not claim to have a crystal ball powerful enough to peer decades into the future. But right now, for this generation, I can say we’re a long way from that point just yet.
Yes, we need the Xbox handheld to fail, we don’t want Windows to take Linux’s best chance to grow.
What is it about backwards compatibility that the Switch 2 is having issues with? I thought it was all games that brought their own hardware, or depended on a feature that the new Switch doesn’t have (IR camera on the Joycon for example)
From my understanding, even though they both run Nvidia-designed ARM processors - there are enough differences between the two SOCs that a direct 1:1 translation is not possible for all titles, and those will need to go through an emulation layer.
Additionally, there are certain titles won’t be compatible due to hardware changes (Ring Fit Adventure for example, and probably all of the LABO stuff?).
For Ring Fit and Labo, they’ve clarified that those games aren’t compatible with new JoyCons but can still be played with old JoyCons.
Nintendo published a list of games with compatibility issues. Says they are “continuing to improve compatibility, including by working with publishing and developing partners”, which implies they’re hoping to patch in fixes for affected games.
For some actual numbers, Valve had sold ~4 million steam decks since it was released over 3 years ago.
Nintendo has sold ~150 million switches to date. And they sold nearly 18 million of them in its first full year (2017).
Considering this console comes after the Deck and the other handhelds, shouldn’t be the other way around?
Btw to answer the question:
Few exclusive titles (for now)
Not great performance to some last year triple A game (like cyberpunk 2077)
The damn price of the games
The answer is: Yes. Any decently performing handheld right now is a better alternative. RIGHT NOW. In a year, with more exclusive titles and ( let’s hope) better game prices, who knows.
Yeah. I’m 100% who Nintendo is trying to lure with this launch, and honestly I’m a little ticked off about it–I’ve really wanted Metroid Prime 4 for a long time, but now it’s coming out and I have to choose between playing an inferior version or shelling out over $500 to play the good version. ($450 for the system, $80 for the game, and compatible SD cards in sizes larger than the internal storage of the new system don’t even exist yet.) So I’m inclined to wait, and see if there are enough good games to justify the Switch 2 purchase eventually, but they’re going to count that as poor initial sales for Prime 4. It might kill the franchise. Replaying some of my switch titles with upgraded performance might have been enough to motivate me to make the move, but they’re also going to charge extra for that. That’s…not great. Nickle-and-diming on top of a much more expensive system with even more expensive games is just ugly.
It definitely has me thinking about getting a PC handheld instead. A lot of what I was picturing was second-screen gaming while watching TV or YouTube, and the Deck is definitely a competitor in that space. There are a bunch of people saying that “oh, the reason you buy a Nintendo system is to play Nintendo exclusives,” which, yeah, that is a selling point, but for the original switch, just being a portable system that played modern games was also a selling point. That second factor is absolutely going up against the Deck, and frankly losing, because Steam has everything. Switch 2 has to go all in on the exclusives, and that’s a much tougher sell, especially since they don’t have the gold mine of good games nobody had played that they had from the Wii U to pad the release schedule.
Maybe they’ll amaze me, but I see them being very unhappy with the revenue from this console in a couple of years, and casting about for stupid shit to blame. And I think they’re gonna blame Metroid. It’s not Metroid, guys. Metroid is great. It’s the pricing.
If all of its games were available elsewhere, there would be a lot less switch users
I keep hearing this shit and it seems like stupid wishful thinking, because in a locked-down universe where Switch 2 is not a shitty proposition for way too much cash compared to getting a PC with 10k+ PC games from the get go and also emulating anything you wish because it’s your hardware and it’s just bits - in that universe, Polygon is a much needed pool of experts that people go to for advice instead of a source of stupid ragebait titles telling them a log of shit is the new snickers.
Yeah, sure, fuck you Polygon
Shit no, its a different market. The switch was designed by committee to extract the maximum amount of money possible from the consumer. The Steam Deck is geared toward PC enthusiasts and built and designed by those same people. They aren’t even in the same ball park.
Nintendo consoles are locked down, solely designed to force you to spend top dollar on the latest Bing-Bing-Wahoo games and late capitalism subscriptions so you can play with children and manchildren alike. You get the choice to buy BingKart Horizon for $80-90, or buy the old Switch 1 games again, full price, because they didn’t want to bother releasing a 5MB update to unlock the framerates and resolution in the original ones. Nintendo wants more money, fuck you, pay more.
Steam Deck is effectively a gaming PC crammed into a handheld. It uses an open OS that you don’t have to root, so you can install almost every game humanity has ever made, including all the previous Bing-Bing-Wahoos. You can get any of these games for FREE (if you’re smart), or just wait for a fire sale held several times a year. We can vaguely count on someone eventually developing an emulator to work with Switch 2 games one day, saving everyone money in the long run, because those angel developers that operate against the wishes of corporate gaming cartel oppressors are the closest thing we have to Santa Claus and Jesus doing a fusion dance. The Steam Deck is how we forgive Gaben for never releasing HL3. Exclusively played by giga-manchildren.
Yes, when combined with the switch 1
I keep retyping what I want to say, but I think my feelings come down to:
I do think the switch 2 will do just fine, but I also think there are a lot of people who loved their switch 1 who might look at the games they played, and look at upgrading to a steamdeck instead of the switch 2.
Is a pants really a competitor for clothing?
Trick question, there’s no “a pants”
Wouldn’t the switch (locked down) be pants and pc handhelds (anything) be clothing?
Yes? That’s the analogy. Did they flip it in the article maybe
I really truly don’t think so. While there is some overlap, I would never give my 5 yo a steam deck and tell them to just figure it out. And on a steam deck, I’d be really sad to not have any Mario kart, Zelda, etc…
I don’t see the problem with having both- they fill different niches.
Money. Steam Deck OLED costs in my country €700, Switch OLED €350-360 and the Switch 2 will be around the €560-600.
I’m so close on purchasing a Steam Deck OLED to game in weekends or in bed after full 5 days behind a desk job. But I’m always worried that these games won’t work well with emulations. I’ve been researching like crazy but keep reading different things.
And spending €700 with uncertainty is not my favorite thing to do.
I really doubt switch 2 games will emulate at all or well for quite some time.
I get the money argument. In that case, get the one that does more for you now now, and save up for the other one later. You don’t need them all at once.
I waited a year before getting the first switch, and almost 2 years for a ps4. I think I waited at least a year for all the other PlayStations too save the 5.
Getting something at launch isn’t all that great- bugs, limited games, max prices, etc… a year or so later and you get bundles and deals and lots of game choices.
I don’t have a deck- but a few of my friends do and I’ve played with it a bit- it’s great and I want one at some point, but I can wait for #2 to come out and then go on sale before I dive in.
Haha, I am researching like crazy as well. So far I came to the conclusion that I have 3 options:
So far I’m waiting. My current Switch isn’t going anywhere, but going forward I’m not going to spend much on games there.
Steam deck is definitely just as easy to use as the switch for playing and downloading basic games from the storefront. A 5 year old could absolutely use it easily with some games preloaded.
Its not specifically hard but its also not just as easy to use. I say this as someone whos been gaming on linux for over a decade now. You still run into issues here and there with proton(often a devs fault for bad code) and there is genuinely a lot more going on and tweakable on the steamdeck.
Steamdeck is a great device but Nintendo is good at making simple systems
The steam deck has way more potential, but CAN be just as simplr as only ever launching and downloading games through gaming mode. The parent downloads 5stean deck verified games and then all the kid has to do is use the joystick to switch between them. But then it also has the potential to be a learning experience or teaching tool as the kid grows. But the steamos gaming mode is dead simple to navigate and a child could definitely use it.
I think we should be asking the question the otherway around as some games on PC handhelds could be cheaper and possibly run better, but that’s just my opinion
They’re cheaper which is insane. We could see a boom if third party manufacturers hop on steamOS now
They’re NOT cheaper. There is exactly one cheaper PC handheld, and it’s the base model of the LCD variant of the Deck.
And the reason for that is that Valve went out of its way to sign a console maker-style large scale deal with AMD. And even then, that model of the Deck has a much worse screen, worse CPU and GPU and presumably much cheaper controls (it does ship with twice as much storage, though).
They are, as the article says, competitive in price and specs, and I’m sure some next-gen iterations of PC handhelds will outperform the Switch 2 very clearly pretty soon, let alone by the end of its life. Right now I’d say the Switch 2 has a little bit of an edge, with dedicated ports selectively cherry picking visual features, instead of having to run full fat PC ports meant for current-gen GPUs at thumbnail resolutions in potato mode.
We don’t really know this. It is possible that the CPU will be trash. Nintendo’s devices don’t really support genres that require CPU power (4X, tycoon, city-builder, RTS, MMO etc.).
While we don’t have detailed info on the Switch 2 CPU, the original Switch CPU was three generations behind at the time of the console’s release.
Best we can tell this is an embedded Ampere GPU with some ARM CPU. The Switch had a slightly weird but very functional CPU for its time. It was a quad core thing with one core reserved for the OS, which was a bit weird in a landscape where every other console could do eight threads, but the cores were clocked pretty fast by comparison.
It’s kinda weird to visualize it as a genre thing, though. I mean, Civ VII not only has a Switch 2 port, it has a Switch 1 port, too. CPU usage in gaming is a… weird and complicated thing. Unless one is a systems engineer working on the specific hardware I wouldn’t make too many assumptions about how these things go.
If you primarily play CPU bound strategy games, you can very much make conclusive statements about CPU performance. For example, Cities in Motion 1 (from the studio that created Cities: Skylines), released in 2010, can bring a modern CPU to its knees if you use modded maps, free look and say a 1440p monitor (the graphics don’t actually matter). Even a simple looking game like The Final Earth 2 can bring your FPS to a crawl due to CPU bottlenecks (even modern CPUs) in the late game with large maps. I will note that The Final Earth 2 has an Android version, but that doesn’t mean the game (which I’ve played on Android) isn’t fundamentally limited by CPU performance.
It very much is a genre thing. Can you show me a game like Transport Fever 2 on the Switch? Cities: Skylines?
The OG switch CPU was completely outdated when released and provides extremely poor performance.
The switch was released in 2017. It’s CPU, the cortex A57, was released in 2012. It was three generation behind the cortex A75 that was released in 2017.
I mean…
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/cities-skylines-nintendo-switch-edition-switch/
So you’re saying it’s identical to the PC version in terms of scope and capabilities?
Have you ever played Cities: Skylines on PC?
And claiming that the Cortex A57 was a capable CPU in 2017 is not serious.
Well, it runs like crap, for sure, but that’s not the bar that you set here.
Now that I think about it, what are you saying? Your point seems a bit muddled.
No, they are successors.
I’d much rather buy a Steam Deck and run Switch emulation on it, knowing I can buy games a whole lot cheaper on Steam sales.
Betteridge wins again.
Handhelds are a niche in PC gaming. Especially in the whole gaming market.
A lot of people are saying they’re not really competition judging off sale numbers but I’d say they are, just PC handhelds aren’t that big of competition. They still are taking away sales as I doubt people with a steam deck are also gonna own a switch or switch 2 unless they already had one before the steam deck came out or are well enough off to afford both and don’t want to deal with emulating. I definitely get Lemmy and myself are a biased audience but I think arguing they’re not competition at all is wrong, they’re just not very big competition compared to Nintendo.