Yes, when combined with the switch 1

I keep retyping what I want to say, but I think my feelings come down to:

1. There are 150 million switch 1's in the wild, that's going to continue to be a massive pull for developers when porting new games.
2. Many families may already have the switch 1, are the exclusives enough of a pull to encourage those people to upgrade?

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.

"In a sense, Nintendo is the victim of its own strategic foresight. With the Switch, it was the first to spot that the narrowing gap in processing power between mobile and at-home devices had enabled a unification of handheld and home gaming experiences."

I was out after this. This is patently wrong. Crucially, Nintendo capitalised on the failure of the vita using the exact same strategy but with a caveat: 3rd party memory cards.

The PSVita had the power to play former gen games in a compact format and MUCH better connectivity than the switch. It failed on the stupid memory cards. Nintendo did not. That's pretty much it. Sony had the AAA handheld market with the PSP and blew it. I'd be very surprised if something like this wasn't uttered by an MBA regard in sony's corpo structure:

"If we divide our playerbase between handheld and dedicated living room console too much it will damage our business".

So instead of capitalising on a massive library of games that could easily have been ported to a handheld format (the PS4 had 1,4TFlops, we've surpased that on mobile before the PS5 launched) SONY decided to double down on AAA and subsequently in live service games, and here we are...

If someone can create a handheld AAA console is a team lead by mark cerny with the support of AMD. To this day I don't know how we end up with PS portal instead...

So here we are, Sony carved out a niche (AAA and fidelity) from the Nintendo handheld success, and just decided to sit on their hands with it. There was exactly 0 foresight from Nintendo. They knew from the beginning the living room was lost to either MS or Sony to begin with.

Imagine if you could go on the Nintendo store and buy a game you couldn’t even run, or had to check a third party website to see if it ran acceptably and let you use all the buttons.

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.

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.

No, they are successors.

The real question is: Do I care? And the answer is no. No I do not.

No they are not mutually exclusive

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.