because all games on PC are free if you want them to be

If you include piracy, that’s available on the Switch too. Worst case you have to chip in €10 for a mod chip, but that’s it.

Lmao so you include all the deals for the switch with your “mario kart upgrade”, but not the steam deck?

Yeah, find me a deal to get Mario Kart for the steam deck legally.

Then you consider it’s also your laptop/main PC too…

You want to use a steam deck as a laptop? Do you really have no self respect?

That also isn’t the point I was even disputing, it’s precisely that the ownership is more expensive because PC gamers buy more games, but either way you’re wrong.

That was exactly my point. Steam Decks/PCs and consoles are used differently by different people, and in the end a Steam Deck is not cheaper than a console, even if you never pay a cent for a game (but then again, why are you buying a Steam Deck?)

But if we keep going

I get the feeling you don’t actually want to discuss or talk about the topic, you just want to win. So yeah, no point in continuing the discussion.

If it’s too much for you, then don’t pay it. It’s not like there are no alternatives.

I usually just buy games years later for a fraction of the price. Or wait until a platform becomes abandonware and I can’t buy a game in retail any more (meaning the publisher doesn’t want to take my money), and then I pirate it.

There are a couple hundred of thousands of great games, I don’t need the flashiest, newest thing.

I’m just saying that the €80 pricing isn’t that crazy, it’s just inflation adjustment. In fact, the €60 price point for full-price games has been around since at least 2005. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around €100 in today’s money.

In fact, SNES games even cost up to €80 in 1993, which would be ~€180 in today’s money, and even the cheapest titles back then (akin to our current low-budget indie titles) started from €40 (~€90 today).

So, the price is really not that bad. And, as I said, you can just wait for the sale and get it cheaper anyway. Full price is only for people who need exactly this game exactly right now.

Price of the middle version of the Steam Deck: €569

Price of the middle version of the Switch 1: €284

So we got a price difference of €285 here.

€50 for the bundled Mario Kart upgrade plus 3 other full price titles, leaves us €55 to spend on another 5 indie titles, and then you got the average total cost of ownership for a switch for just about the price of the Steam Deck with a whopping 0 games on it.

The difference becomes starker if you go for the top-spec version: €679 for the Steam Deck, vs €329 for the Switch, a whopping €350 difference. For that difference you can afford Mario Kart plus 4 full-price titles and have another €60 remaining for a few indie titles.

You are fighting windmills, capische?

You made up an argument that I never made and now you are fighting against it.

Well done, Don Quijote, the windmill is destroyed and you can go home claiming you defended the land from evil giants.

That is true, of course. But that’s a vulnerability from Nintendo’s perspective, not from a customer’s perspective. As in, if this exploit gets improved on, it might lead to people running unlicensed or pirated software on the switch, thus potentially hurting Nintendo.

It’s not something that might lead to people getting their Nintendo-accounts hacked or stolen or something like that.

On a Steam Deck, the former concept doesn’t even exist. There’s no Steam Deck vulnerability that might lead to people running non-steam software on the Steam Deck, because it’s allowed usage.

What I’m trying to say is that vulnerability is not negative for the user or indicative of bad platform security for the user.

Never heard of a steam backlog? PC is the number one piracy platform, but it’s also the only platform where people buy whole bundles of games in a sale or where you get at least one game for free every week.

Have a look at Nintendos sales figures: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.html

Take for example the switch: 152 mio devices sold, vs 1391 mio units of software sold. That’s roughly 9 titles per device since 2017, or roughly one game per year.

Compare that to your 435 titles over 12 years, which equals roughly 36 titles per year.

You are a heavy buyer of games, in the order of 36x of what’s the average for a switch user. You just proved my point.

Btw, these 9 titles would have cost a switch user just €540, if all of them were AAA games at full price. That too doesn’t factor in that the figure from Nintendo includes massively popular cheap indie titles or the fact that even Nintendo games sometimes go on sale.

Let me rephrase that:

I mean, especially as a parent do I want to waste hours setting up the system, fixing misconfigurations and trying to keep my elementary school kid from watching porn or heavy violence on the system?

€80 is a lot, but not nearly as much as the time you spend on the device if you factor in your hourly rate.

And for most non-techy parents the choice doesn’t even exist. They don’t even know how they’d setup parental controls or fix issues on a PC.

Also: if you put €60 from 2017 into an inflation calculator and convert that to 2025 money, you get €82. Yes, it sucks that everything gets more expensive, but that’s just how inflation works.

My grandma also always complained that when she was young she could get a whole bar of chocolate for 0.50 Schilling (€~0.04).

Unless you are actually using your PC. Setting up everything involves much more than just installing the OS. If I want to get all my apps working and my data transferred to where it needs to go, and all my peripherals and stuff running, it takes me a day or two.

That’s why I’m still stuck on a distro with more issues than things going for it.

That sounds more like a bug than just bad performance.

Be really careful with Fedora or Bazzite.

I’ve been using Fedora for the last few months, because of all the recommendations, and it’s been a constant struggle. Fast updates means I can always enjoy the newest bugs and issues. That’s ok for a toy system I use to tinker, but not for my main system that I just need to work.

Ubuntu was much more stable and worked better. People hate on it because of their semi-proprietary app delivery system (snap). They feel that Canonical is betraying the open source spirit with it. If you don’t care about that, Ubuntu is pretty nice.

Btw, Bazzite is immutable, Fedora is not.

You know the PC vs. Console debate isn’t new. That one has been going on ever since PCs and consoles existed.

When I was a teenager, I, too, didn’t understand why anyone would buy a console over a PC because the PC can do so much more than a console.

Then I got kids, and I understood.

There are two main angles:

• Parental controls

On a console, a kid can only play what I allow. I get the games, I can disable features (e.g. browser or social features) that I deem risky. It’s all easy, it just works. My 7yo won’t be playing Fortnite or Doom without my approval. Try locking down any kind of PC (Windows or Linux) to a child safe level so that the kid doesn’t have access to age-inappropriate content. It’s borderline impossible. My dad tried and failed, and if I tried, I’d most likely fail too.

• Ease of use

Every second time, my wife and kids want to play something on the living room PC they call me to fix some issue. The controller isn’t pairing. The controller is pairing, but the game doesn’t recognise it. Steam link to the gaming PC doesn’t work. Or it does work, but the resolution is crap. Or all sorts of other issues. With consoles, you don’t have that. It all just works.

A PC is definitely the more capable system, and a power user will get more out of it than out of a console, no question about that.

But claiming there is no use case for a console is entirely wrong, too. A look at sales numbers for Switch (152mio sold) vs Steam Deck (3.7mio sold) should clear the question up whether there’s a use case for a switch.

Btw, would it be legal to use a torrent client that uses an LLM to make up the outgoing packets so that you aren’t sending copyrighted material? ;)

A handheld PC isn’t cheaper to buy, and most console gamers aren’t buying a ton of games either (like PC gamers do), so the total cost of ownership for a switch 2 probably still stays under the total cost of ownership for a handheld PC.

Edit: To clarify my point, the average Switch user owns 9 titles according to official Nintendo sales figures. This includes cheap indie titles. (Source: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.html)

Outside of PC, it’s not normal that the average user has a backlog of hundreds of games.

And the switch 2 can run the new mario kart and the steam deck not.

Both of these games don’t run on the other platform because they are exclusives, not because the hardware can’t handle it. So what’s your point?

It’s just confirming what the guy you replied to was saying: if you have steam games and want to run steam games, get a steam deck. If you have switch games and want to run switch games, get a switch.

Especially considering what’s classified as a vulnerability.

The vulnerability on the switch let’s you execute unsigned code in user space, no kernel access or even hardware acceleration.

On the steam deck (like on any PC) that’s nit called a vulnerability but “running a program”. It’s literally the main use case.

Couldn’t it use some kind of partial kernel emulation to make kernel level anticheat think it’s working?

Again someone who thinks that public policies are natural laws…

NASA could do and did do what SpaceX is doing now, but they are beholden to the government and if the government says “we don’t do that for ideologigal reasons” then it doesn’t matter what can be done.

Thanks for the summary! That sounds freaky!

Well, the trade-off between trusting a huge corporation or a single dude on the internet.

What exactly happened there? It was the big thing, then I didn’t use it for a month or so and then it was gone.

Even if you make them in large quantities, material cost alone will be at least €50k. You will need a skilled operator nearby, and constant maintainance, and if you lose even one per year, a regular underpaid human worker will be much cheaper.

These things are pure marketing devices to pacify investors, generate headlines and make unions and workers afraid.