Is Nintendo’s Next Competitor Emerging?
In light of Steam’s recent announcement a few weeks back, around their new gaming handheld, are we going to seeing a true competitor to Nintendo’s Handheld legacy, or will it fail like so many others in their attempt to topple the king of handhelds?
Introducing the Steam Deck
The Steam Deck, is a high quality almost in a sense a portable PC in your hands, running SteamOS, giving you access to your steam library where ever you go. What at this stage is arguably the stand-out USP, would be its power.
Here is a rundown of the hardware powering the Steam Deck for those interested.
Processor: AMD APU
CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4–3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0–1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
APU power: 4–15W
RAM: 16 GB LPDDR5 on-board RAM (5500 MT/s quad 32-bit channels)
Storage:
64 GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1)
256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
(source)
Not only does the Steam Deck have the power, that gives the community what they were hoping for from the anticipated ‘Nintendo Switch Pro’ but like its main competitor it can be connected to a monitor or TV and used as a full-fledged PC.
Let’s take a trip back through history
To better understand how the future may be shaped around the competition between Steam and Nintendo, let us take a trip back to Nintendo’s rivals of times gone by.
Sega Game Gear
Launched in the early 1990s Sega’s Game Gear was a direct response to the rising popularity in the market around Nintendo’s Gameboy. Nintendo and Sega already had a well-known rivalry with Nintendo. The competition between the SNES and the Mega Drive, was a close-fought battle, with some ‘questionable’ marketing tactics from Sega.
Having sold an impressive 10.62 million, it still fell far short of the success of Nintendos Gameboy hitting an astronomical 118.69 million (now this does include the Pocket and Gameboy Colour)
So why did the Game Gear fall short?
Even though on paper it was probably the better of the two handhelds, boasting a backlit screen at the time. It comes down to several factors including price point, game library, and so on, but what I would argue was Nintendos savior, was its mass-market appeal, the Gameboy had more appeal to the wider market.
Sony PSP and PS Vita
Fast forward a few years and Sony wanted to get a piece of the handheld market cake, realizing the PSP back in 2005 and later saw the launch of the PS Vita in early 2012.
The PS Vita at the time was again on paper a better, more powerful system in almost every way than Nintendos handheld at the time, the 3DS. I mean the Vita had an OLED screen, Nintendo still has not officially launched an OLED model, over 10 years later.
The PS Vita in the eyes of Sony was ultimately a failure, selling around 16 million units by 2018 (source) which dwarfed in comparison to Nintendos 3DS sales of around 75.93 million units.
Again another giant company coming up against Nintendo in the handheld market falling short, and again from a competitor with better hardware and stats on paper.
So why did the Vita fail in the eyes of Sony and led them to leave it behind to focus more on their home console systems?
Again there are many contributing factors, from the incredibly expensive Vita memory cards ( I mean my goodness, even today I would need to remortgage to get one!) down to how it was marketed.
During a time of the rise of mobile gaming, Sony decided to add all the bells and whistles to the Vita, from a Touchscreen at the front and back to a model with 3G support. The main problem at the time was the mobile market was more appealing to the masses, and by aiming for that specific section of the market they failed where Nintendo continued to grow.
To summarise
Although history does tend to repeat itself, and I would be very confident in saying the Steam Deck will not completely wipe Nintendo out of the handheld market. I believe and hope that Steam will be able to carve its segment into the handheld market. Time will tell.
Through this possible future competition with Nintendo, as we have seen with Sony and Microsoft, will help push both companies forward and provide us, with even better products in the future.
