[metadat]

I bought a Steam Deck earlier this year and haven’t touched my Switch since. Nintendo hardware and games were already obscenely overpriced imo, so this is essentially a nail in the coffin for folks who were already questioning Nintendo’s prices and value proposition.

Does Nintendo intentionally make its hardware really underpowered and cheap in terms of chips to juice profits? In the past this was more the case, but with the Switch 2 the hardware bill of materials is actually more costly relative to previous products like the Switch 1.

Poor timing of market forces (Sam Altman spending VC money to purchase all the world’s memory chips). Ouch.

[InsideOutSanta]

By "a nail in the coffin", do you mean that people will stop buying Switches? Because I would be very surprised by that.

It's not like most people even know what a Steam Deck is. At the moment at least, the two devices mostly don't compete for the same audience. And if you want to play Nintendo's games - which a lot of people do, they're usually quite good - you don't have much choice anyway.

[ksymph]

Nintendo's core audience has always been children, their parents, and casual players, but with some console cycles they expand into other niches, as has (resoundingly) been the case with the Switch; the Switch appealed to virtually anyone interested in playing games on the go, including people who otherwise don't usually buy the newest Nintendo console/games for their polish and/or family-friendliness. For a long time it was by far the most convenient way to play Skyrim or Witcher 3 or what-have-you on buses, planes, at school etc.

The Steam Deck doesn't cut into Nintendo's core audience, but it does draw away people who would have bought the Switch 1/2 for those reasons -- the audience that made the Switch 1 such an overwhelming success. Anecdotally, I've had multiple non-techies bring up the Steam Deck unprompted, usually with an impression of 'the Switch but better' and/or 'more adult-oriented'.

Historically, when the market they created starts to become saturated, Nintendo starts looking to pivot. So the Steam Deck might not kill the Switch 2, but I'd be very surprised if it doesn't kill the Switch 3.

[seanmcdirmid]

I don't think Nintendo will put out a Switch 3, they would probably have something new by then. And...as a parent of a 9 year old, I couldn't imagine getting him a steam deck (he still has a Switch 1 though).

[gorjusborg]

> It's not like most people even know what a Steam Deck is.

Steam basically is PC gaming at this point, which is still a massive market that is almost as big as the entirety of console gaming.

I know there are those out there, but I would be slightly surprised if a PC gamer didn't know what a Steam Deck was in 2026.

As someone who has pretty much every console system and most handhelds, I didn't spring for a Switch 2, and it is for the exact reason the thread parent mentions. I do like Nintendo games, as they are consistently high quality, but they are not usually graphics reliant for fun, and the Switch is good enough still, and I don't love paying $90 USD for a single game when I can buy $5-20 games on Steam and play them across multiple devices.

[evilduck]

The Switch also followed a poor WiiU cycle that caused some pent up demand and launched with Zelda BotW which was an epic title. People bought Switches just to play that game and then stuck around to buy other titles on the platform. The Switch 2 doesn't have either going for it.

I'm in the same boat as you, I also don't feel the need to buy a Switch 2 yet. Also, game sharing on Steam with my kids is just so much more pleasant. Having multiple kids and multiple Switches was such a shit show of what felt like manual license and provisioning management that I'm not really keen on giving Nintendo more money at this time.

[uejfiweun]

Yes, Nintendo is essentially the futuristic version of Disney. And families will continue to pay a premium in exchange for a curated experience that you know will be OK for your child.

[ge96]

Breath of the Wild when that came out only reason I would have bought a Switch. But apparently if you own it can run it through QEMU on PC.

I have neither devices right now, only a PC.

[JeremyNT]

> Does Nintendo intentionally make its hardware really underpowered and cheap in terms of chips to juice profits? In the past this was stronger but with the Switch 2 the hardware bill of materials is actually more costly relative to previous products like the Switch 1.

They know that the combination of extremely high quality first party exclusives combined with hugely popular IP is going to move units even if they're "overpriced" as devices to play any other games.

When my daughter's Switch 1 died, I had the choice between the 2 and the Steam Deck, and I chose the Deck. It's got a ton of games and the cheap Steam back catalog is great, but... no Mario? No Zelda?

I won't pretend I wasn't tempted to own both.

[cardanome]

The combination of expensive hardware AND expensive games kills the switch 2 for me.

80 Dollar just to play Mario Kart?

Even older switch titles are barely ever on sale.

I never buy games at full price so the economics don't add up for me. I guess it works for the kind of person that buys games on release. If someone has that much money to burn they don't need to care about hardware cost either I guess.

[musicale]

> 80 Dollar just to play Mario Kart?

Always has been:

https://gamerant.com/mario-kart-game-launch-price-adjusted-i...

It's also the best game in its category (which Nintendo basically invented), offers terrific local multiplayer on a single console, and is something you can enjoy for years with friends and family.

[xp84]

Yeah Nintendo basically doesn’t even acknowledge the concept of marking things down, even many years after their release. And as the physical media window begins closing, even buying a used game will become not a thing anymore. Probably the Switch 3 or whatever they call it will not have a card slot anymore. And used consoles might lose all their games when signed out of an account. I’m sure they’d love that.

[__s]

You can run Ship of Harkinian on steamdeck

Twilight Princess soon

[staticman2]

Most people probably want to get a game and play it without figuring out how to navigate pirate web sites.

[jjordan]

Nintendo hardware IMO is mostly reasonably priced. Their first party game library is why many buy into the ecosystem and they charge a premium for it. The original Switch was under-powered but also the first of its kind. The Switch 2 was mostly a hardware bump with additional polish to the rough edges of the original Switch.

[ozbonus]

Does Nintendo intentionally make its hardware really underpowered and cheap in terms of chips to juice profits?

Yes! Famously so, in fact. Look up Gupei Yokoi and "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology".

[johnnyanmac]

As another fun fact: the most powerful system has never "won" the console generation. Nintendo only has to be strong enough to realize its and 3rd party's visions. And even then, it can get away with being a little weaker than that line.

[gorjusborg]

Comments like yours are why I come to HN discussions. Thanks for sharing.

[afavour]

Maybe I'm in a bubble but I really don't see the Steam Deck and Switch as big competitors for each other. I mean, yes, they're both portable games consoles, but I'd bet a large percentage of Switch gamers don't even know what a Steam Deck is.

There's a reason Nintendo targets and wins with very casual gamers. It would take a lot more than a $50 price increase to be the 'nail in the coffin' for the Switch.

[chocochunks]

There's some overlap. I think it probably has a bigger impact on game attach rate for a certain segment of gamer. I bought a lot less games on Switch upon getting a PC handheld, not because of price (generally I find games are pretty comparable there), but because the PC version is more flexible and I'm pretty sure I can run the PC version ten years down on some PC. Will Nintendo's next console run it? No idea.

[juancn]

Nintendo is almost on a different market than Steam, XBox, and all the others.

I don't think it will matter much. They live off the exclusives.

[array_key_first]

I don't understand this position at all. In the console space, Nintendo makes the cheapest console and it's not even that close. The switch originally launched at 300 dollars. Keep in mind their competitors are well into 700+ dollar land.

The steam deck is more expensive as well, and the switch 2 is much more powerful than the steam deck.

[GorbachevyChase]

Adults aren’t the target market. I pay a premium because I know there are content standards and at least the big titles aren’t going to bombard my kids with inappropriate content.

[ProfessorLayton]

>Adults aren’t the target market.

Adults are VERY MUCH the target market: See page 10 of Nintendo's investor relations doc.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2022/221109e.pdf

[willis936]

But also most parents will scoff at the prices and tell them to pick cheaper toys.

[Analemma_]

That hasn’t been happening since the beginning of video games and it isn’t about to start now. Adjusted for inflation the NES was about $590 at launch and individual games were $90-120. Didn’t stop it from nearly wiping the American video game industry clean off the earth.

[toast0]

To be fair, the American video game industry had pretty well wiped itself off the earth. Nintendo came in and actively worked to present itself as different and did a fair bit of anti-competitive stuff once it got market power: can't release the same game on other platforms, limited release count per developer, strict cartridge hardware controls, etc.

[johnnyanmac]

The bigger issue is that they'd scoff at the price and get their kids to play Roblox or Fortnite on some tablet. The steam deck isn't what the console marker is really worried about these days.

[GorbachevyChase]

Maybe, but if they spend more than $100/mo on alcohol, nails, or weed, then it’s a perspective problem.

[epicide]

Given that everybody, including Valve, are in the same boat, I'm not sure Nintendo is that much worse off for this.

It's true that fewer people will be buying fewer consoles as a whole, but gaming is a pretty competitive market. I'm sure Nintendo will take a hit regardless, but probably no more than the likes of Sony, MS, Valve, etc.

Like any gold rush, the only people who win are the ones selling the shovels (in this case, Nvidia).

[tapoxi]

Steam Deck starts at almost the same price - $549. The base model was discontinued. The Switch 2 has superior performance, an inferior screen, and comes with the dock + detachable controllers.

[vjk800]

The only reason to buy Nintendo hardware is so that you can play Nintendo's exclusive games. In the past, I felt that it was worth it. In the recent years, there haven't been many good Nintendo releases, definitely not enough to justify buying Switch 2.

I feel that Nintendo should really become just a software company. All consoles are converging towards using more or less similar PC hardware anyway, so having your own hardware platform doesn't seem very useful anymore.

[musicale]

> The only reason to buy Nintendo hardware is so that you can play Nintendo's exclusive games

Nintendo also pushes gaming innovation in different directions, enabling interesting experiences. It's not always successful, but is rarely boring: virtual boy (proto-VR), dual screen gaming (DS, 3DS, Wii U), asymmetric multiplayer (Wii U), split controller with motion controls (Wii, Switch), advanced haptics (Switch), screen-free gaming (1-2 Switch), glasses-free lenticular 3D (3DS), hybrid cardboard gaming (Labo/Switch), slab handheld (2DS), hybrid handheld/TV gaming (Wii U, Switch), asynchronous network interaction and game data sharing (3DS street pass), moderated social networking (Warawara Plaza and MiiVerse on Wii U and 3DS), etc.

The consoles are carefully designed. Game Boy had a non-backlit, reflective display that enabled it to be used in broad daylight and helped it achieve a 50-hour battery life. GBA SL and Nintendo DS/3DS were attractive and functional clamshell designs. GameCube (a compact and rather charming purple cube design) had a handle to encourage people to move the system to different TVs or bring it to friends' houses. Switch has a kickstand and a dock system to enable quick switching between handheld, tabletop, and TV-attached gaming, all without restarting the game.

[ethagknight]

I just bought a Switch 2 for my kids and I am very impressed with it. Yes, pricing for games and components is wild, but so is everything else these days. The Switch software is very good, the kids love it, Nintendo online retro games are awesome, and we've had a lot of fun playing Zelda together.

I would pay 50 more dollars for the same experience if thats what it took. I do think Nintendo should provide a little more value at the new price, but it's not a huge gap.

[nsxwolf]

Does anyone really find the Switch 2 to be underpowered? Is the Steam Deck really that much more powerful, and is it worth the extra 100 grams of weight?

Metroid Prime 4 looks amazing, and you can choose 4K@60 or 1080p@120. I don't really care about generated frames or whatever AI magic the console is doing to pull it off, it looks great.

[chocochunks]

It's not really. The CPU in the Switch 2 isn't the most amazing and the Steam Deck has 4GB extra RAM (but it's also got a lighter OS), but the GPU is worse on Deck. Switch 2 offers pretty comparable performance in handheld mode, better in docked and devs are more likely to tailor games for Switch 2. FF7 Rebirth looks like trash on Deck, even on my faster 780M handheld it was pretty ugly, I had to hack in FSR3/4 support for it to look remotely decent. Switch 2 by comparison looks better. Star Wars Outlaws is another example.

[FunHearing3443]

The switch 2 is definitively more powerful than the steam deck and also supports DLSS.

[dragontamer]

> 4K@60

Parts of Samus's gun and some parts of the UI are 4k.

I'm a Nintendo fan but this 4k@60 claim from Nintendo is incredibly laughable. The vast majority of the screen is upscaled.

I think there were a bunch of 4k Hatsune Miku games that came out. It turns out that 2D renderings at 4k can be accomplished with very low end hardware.

The game looks good because Nintendo has excellent artists. So I guess it's worth the money. But the technical specs are completely baloney.

[nsxwolf]

4K mode looks better to me than 1080p on my TV, I'm not Digital Foundry so I don't know how to count pixels or whatever. I would imagine most people don't care much and can't see the difference from where they are sitting in the room anyway.

It more than gets the job done, the job I hired it to do is make the games impress me visually and allow me to experience the thrill of technological progress, and it does that very well.

[dragontamer]

4k is a technical spec. It's the same as lying about the horsepower of your car.

Nintendo (and NVidia) are playing games with specs. And it's incredibly off-putting to me.

Lying about small things means the company will lie about large things. This sort of thing erodes trust, especially because 4k is so easy to test and figure out.

-------

There are other words for better than 1080p. Such as 1440p or 2k. Which is closer to what the new Metroid game actually does.

[scblock]

"The vast majority of the screen is upscaled."

I have bad news for you, friend. You just described AAA gaming on anything less than a 5090 (and not even then, at all times). Without DLSS or FSR many modern games won't run smoothly at 4k on typical hardware (such as a 5070, which costs more than a Switch 2, or a 5060, which costs about the same).

[dragontamer]

I know.

That's why it's laughable that a Switch2 would play anything at 4k@60Hz.

So I'm just pointing it out and laughing at the fanboys. It is literally laughable. This is a tech site where I expected more people to know what these words mean rather than echoing (clearly bullshit) marketing points.

This is a console with 100GB/s memory bandwidth. Like come on guys. It's a whole order of magnitude to weak to make a claim like 4k@60Hz, but all the Nintendo fans are just gobbling up the marketing without thinking.

100GB/s is closer to 2010 era tech (PS3 or something) than 2025.

[InsideOutSanta]

It's an odd criticism to begin with. The Switch is a toy, it's not a PC. Apart from a few shitty PC ports, it runs its games just fine, so in what sense is it really "underpowered"? Would Super Mario Bros. Wonder be a better game if the Switch 2 could push twice as many polygons?

[lightedman]

"The Switch is a toy, it's not a PC. Apart from a few shitty PC ports, it runs its games just fine, so in what sense is it really "underpowered"?"

Well this comment down below brings it about really quickly:

"Switch 2 has better FPS for Switch 1 games. Like BotW stops having terrible FPS drops in certain scenarios."

If you need a newer-gen piece of hardware to run an older-gen FIRST PARTY title at acceptable speeds without issues then I'm going to say you are ABSOLUTELY and PURPOSEFULLY selling underpowered hardware (and Nintendo has been doing it since the days of the NES. So many first-party titles with slowdowns because the hardware was not up to the task.)

[9x39]

Switch also tried to live in the portable console niche, above handhelds, and this was several years before Steam Deck. SOC development favors the later devices, obviously.

BoTW was still generally acceptable to people: https://www.metacritic.com/game/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-o...

[maccard]

Compared to Xbox and PlayStation it’s vastly underpowered.

They’re not “shitty PC ports”, they’re ports that people tried, likely managed to one platform and then when they tried on switch 2 realised just how far behind it is.

[johnnyanmac]

>Compared to Xbox and PlayStation it’s vastly underpowered.

Sure, the same way an IPhone 17 is vastly underpowerred compared to a PS5. I'd hope we don't need to go into details on why that's not a very useful comparison.

>They’re not “shitty PC ports”,

Garbage in, garbage out. They are called "shitty PC ports" because the port to the PC from the PS5/XBX was bad, without the specs excuse.

[Fricken]

Yeah, but does having twice the polygons make the game twice as fun? It does not. The Switch is only behind on metrics that don't matter.

[maccard]

No, but that's like asking does having half the polygons make it half as fun.

[9x39]

How well do Pokopia and Mario Galaxy play on PS and Xbox?

Performance is orthogonal to the Switch aims, which are about those tightly curated Nintendo titles.

[maccard]

> Performance is orthogonal to the Switch aims, which are about those tightly curated Nintendo titles.

I disagree. https://opencritic.com/browse/switch%202 Half of the top rated games on Switch 2 are multiplatform titles

[someguyiguess]

The steam deck is 4 year old hardware. The Switch 2 came out last summer. So if they're about on-par performance-wise, doesn't that prove OP's point?

[semiquaver]

Holy goalposts-moving, Batman!

[tailscaler2026]

Can you show me where I can purchase a Steam Deck? They're out of stock except overpriced auction sites.

[metadat]

I put a watch notification on slickdeals.net for it. As soon as they get restocked on the site they tend to sell out quickly (presumably people really want them).

[musicale]

> Nintendo hardware and games were already obscenely overpriced imo

Nothing against those $1 game sales on Steam or gog.com (or "free to play"/live service games – for those who can tolerate their monetization schemes), but fun/benefit per dollar for {Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros., Animal Crossing, Ring Fit Adventure, etc.} has been huge for me, even accounting for the cost of the console and additional controllers.

Being able to pop in a physical game card and play the game immediately (even if you are offline) is another thing I appreciated about the Switch (though unfortunately some Switch 2 games are not available as real game cards.)

> Does Nintendo intentionally make its hardware really underpowered and cheap in terms of chips to juice profits? In the past this was more the case, but with the Switch 2 the hardware bill of materials is actually more costly relative to previous products like the Switch 1.

Underpowered and cheap, yes, but not really "to juice profits". See "lateral thinking with withered technology":

"his strategy demonstrated Nintendo's belief that graphical advancement is not the only way to make progress in gaming technology; indeed, after the Wii's overwhelming success, Sony and Microsoft released their own motion control peripherals."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi

[elfly]

Newer, more expensive console runs better than older, cheaper one.

Insane.

[chaostheory]

Yeah, the emulator support is nice

[snapcaster]

I wish people (nerds like us) would use better language. It's not overpriced, because a product is more than a pile of chips and tech specs. Do you realize you're implicitly assuming CPU speed == product quality and how untrue that is?

It provides incredible value for its price (hours of fun per $) when compared to basically any other form of entertainment

[metadat]

I like this perspective. I was thinking in terms of enjoyment I derived from switch 1 vs steam deck. For me, the Deck has already unlocked way more fun!

[quectophoton]

And when you don't need the Steam Deck for gaming anymore, it is still useful as a home server.