Don’t get me wrong I love my Steam Deck… But with its mass-market appeal the Switch 2 is going to steamroll over the handheld gaming device market.
As streamlined as it is, the Steam Deck is sometimes finnicky due to it being a PC (which is an amazing thing for tinker-minded folks). Plus it cannot play some of the most popular PC games on the planet (Fortnite, LoL, Roblox, etc).
Windows handhelds are even more niche, because dealing with Windows on handhelds… Man that takes some serious dedication.
I would wager that Nintendo is going to sell at least 20x more units as the whole handheld gaming PCs lineup combined.
Most of the time it’s because client-side anti-cheat is not being well or at all supported on Linux.
For instance Roblox used to run on Linux through launchers such as Grapejuice or Vinegar. However the devs now explicitely block Roblox player on Linux due to a large quantity of cheaters coming from there according to their stats. Since their actual Linux userbase is minuscule compared to other platforms, they just chose go the easy (and probably financially sane) route.
If we only had a few more programmers. It’s the Linux problem. I love the Steam Deck hardware. Valve has done an amazing job there; I wish they would get to tens of millions of users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it.
Mostly due to lack of support from the developers, but that often reaches into willful obstruction. People are stubborn and clever, if it can run on windows it can likely run on Linux, but the devs will sometimes put willful roadblocks against things running on Linux. Allegedly to stop cheats, though since most anti cheat software does support Linux I think they just don’t want to deal with the OS.
If you install windows it can, but natively it can’t as those games don’t support Linux. However, you loose a lot of the value of the steamdeck (SteamOS) by installing windows.
Also windows sucks on a handheld. I dual booted for a while, but it’s just not really worth it.
Don’t get me wrong I love my Steam Deck… But with its mass-market appeal the Switch 2 is going to steamroll over the handheld gaming device market.
As streamlined as it is, the Steam Deck is sometimes finnicky due to it being a PC (which is an amazing thing for tinker-minded folks). Plus it cannot play some of the most popular PC games on the planet (Fortnite, LoL, Roblox, etc).
Windows handhelds are even more niche, because dealing with Windows on handhelds… Man that takes some serious dedication.
I would wager that Nintendo is going to sell at least 20x more units as the whole handheld gaming PCs lineup combined.
I think the Fortnite, LoL etc stuff will be fixed soon enough.
If there are enough SteamDeck (or SteamOS) people around, they would have to fix it, or they would be missing out on those people.
Out of the loop. Why is this?
Most of the time it’s because client-side anti-cheat is not being well or at all supported on Linux.
For instance Roblox used to run on Linux through launchers such as Grapejuice or Vinegar. However the devs now explicitely block Roblox player on Linux due to a large quantity of cheaters coming from there according to their stats. Since their actual Linux userbase is minuscule compared to other platforms, they just chose go the easy (and probably financially sane) route.
As for Fortnite, it’s all about the ROI baby !
Mostly due to lack of support from the developers, but that often reaches into willful obstruction. People are stubborn and clever, if it can run on windows it can likely run on Linux, but the devs will sometimes put willful roadblocks against things running on Linux. Allegedly to stop cheats, though since most anti cheat software does support Linux I think they just don’t want to deal with the OS.
League of Legends used to work until they brought their kernel level anti-cheat from Valorant into League as well.
If you install windows it can, but natively it can’t as those games don’t support Linux. However, you loose a lot of the value of the steamdeck (SteamOS) by installing windows.
Also windows sucks on a handheld. I dual booted for a while, but it’s just not really worth it.