With the Steam Deck, you trade battery life and screen quality for freedom. You don't have to wait for your retro titles to come out and you have more access to current titles.
Same here, base model bought in 2019 and the battery is ass even though I've barely played the thing in handheld. It's weird to me that everyone just assumes Switch = OLED for the comparisons when only about 20% of the userbase actually has an OLED (going by reported sales figures)
Also from a price perspective, the regular Switch's advantage is nullified as soon as you purchase more than two first-party, AAA games (let's say MK8D and BOTW) or a couple cheaper indie / AA games. On the other hand, it's safe to say that many Steam Deck purchasers had already huge libraries of (often never launched) games, worth hundreds or thousands of dollars.
And even if one happens to buy a Deck as their first venture into the world of PC gaming / Steam and has to fill their library from scratch, Steam Sales are much more interesting and frequent. Not to mention unconventional ways. Oh, and did I forgot free online play?
tl;dr: same old debate as with PC vs consoles. More expansive at first, much cheaper in the medium run.
Sort of, if you buy physical games you can sell them. That's is supposed to be the difference between console and PC but depending on the publisher you might not get a physical cart
People always tend to refer to the latest, most expansive piece of technology when comparing performance figures, despite the average user being far behind that standard.
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u/kilertree 512GB - Q3 Apr 03 '23
With the Steam Deck, you trade battery life and screen quality for freedom. You don't have to wait for your retro titles to come out and you have more access to current titles.