[jrek]

The PS Vita is an apt point of comparison - a beautiful piece of hardware that performed fantastically (and in my opinion much more impressive for its time than the steam deck) - that is considered to have been a complete failure.

[jchw]

Steam Deck really is an interesting comparison. It must be frustrating that Valve releases Steam Deck to fanatical reception if you feel like PS Vita was a better product for it's time. Even though PS Vita may have been a great product, it's possibly one that simply was not at the right place or time. I really think that Sony needed to win, not just sell modestly.

A big and weird part of this is simply because Valve is different. Still a corporation, still flawed, but certainly, if nothing else, definitely different. They have an appeal almost reminiscent of how people once regarded Google a long time ago. They've gotten a solid reputation for playing the long game with respect to building their ecosystem, and in that regard, Deck feels like a product many years in the making: the Steam client and games library, Proton and DXVK, the overlay and other middleware libraries, the multiple iterations of SteamOS, and many more endeavors all came into the product that the Deck is today.

Meanwhile, PS Vita did not have the luxury of the depth of consumer goodwill that Valve has, even if Sony has many times the breadth of consumer goodwill; worse, it needed to bootstrap it's ecosystem, whereas Valve has committed to bringing it's entire existing ecosystem to Deck instead. Valve also had the luxury of not being a traditional video game console vendor, and thus I don't think it elicited as strong of a reaction in the "console wars" either: I do not think that people view it the same. And hell, I don't think Valve does either. It has an aggressive starting price, and thus definitely can compete, but it seems probably still profitable. At the higher end, it's priced more like a gaming laptop, and thus the enthusiast gear that you would expect. I think they landed themselves a nearly unloseable situation with Deck. Because it's basically just an extension of their existing Steam ecosystem, it's essentially a value-add at worst. I would bet it acts more complimentary to other consoles, and there are probably few Deck owners without at least one other game console.

As a competitor to Nintendo's gaming handhelds and as a successor to the PSP, it seems like consumers largely rejected the PS Vita. Maybe in an alternate universe where Sony took an entirely different approach to the ecosystem and marketing of the PS Vita, things could've gone very differently.