After a few casual evenings with the Nintendo Switch 2, I’m having more fun now than I ever had with the Steam Deck, and I think I know why.
I have been playing a lot of Mario Kart lately. So far, it's been with the same group of friends who play, starting a voice chat directly through the Switch 2, and doing a couple of races every other evening.
I also started a new save in No Man's Sky (I still don't know what I'm supposed to achieve in this game) and Cyberpunk 2077 (which supports cross-progress!), and started slowly going through the backlog of Switch games I bought but never played.
And while spending so much time with the Switch 2, I've been slowly realizing: I enjoy this thing much more than I ever enjoyed the Steam Deck.
I tried to understand why this is the case. After all, the Steam Deck is the much more complete package: it can technically run all Steam games I own–and damn, I own a ton of them–, it can technically emulate all games, even up to the Switch, and when something doesn't run natively, it can technically stream them either through the cloud or on my network.
But I think the problem is in that word "technically". It can technically do it, but to actually make it run, you'll spend a shit ton of time trying to dial everything in, changing settings, and fighting with crashes, hangups and freezes.
The Switch 2 has none of these problems. Things just work out of the box, for better or worse. Of course, this comes with trade-offs. If a game performs poorly, and by the end of the Switch 1 lifecycle, a lot of games did, there is nothing you can do to make it perform better.
There are no graphic settings, no dials or knobs to turn. It either works the way Nintendo and the devs intended to, or, well, it doesn't, and you'll have to deal with choppy frame rates.
But in a certain way, this is also freeing. When I'm on the go, and want to play on a handheld, or at home on the couch, and simply want to play a quick game of something, not having to deal with the potential headaches of a gaming (handheld) PC is the experience I am aiming for.
Too often have I been burned on the Steam Deck when I tried to play a new game I was looking forward to. Burned, because the game didn't start or performed poorly, and I didn't do the due diligence to prepare my game session in advance.
With time, I have been realizing that what I mostly want to do is to just play a game and not bother with any graphic settings. I simply want to enjoy games even if that means I can't squeeze out the best possible image by changing dials.
(Though, it also helps that I have an RTX 4090, which has enough raw power I can throw at games at max settings, whenever I do want the prettiest image.)
What this might mean is that I am slowly transforming into a console peasant gamer, as the beauty of consoles vs PCs has always been their ease-of-use.
This is maybe why I prefer the Switch 2 to the Steam Deck or any of the other handhelds I own.