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We live in a global economy. As the US goes, so goes at least half the world, though certain countries have done a good job of insulating themselves from that fallout.
The PS6 will be out in two years or less, while PS4 games will still be getting ports to Switch 2. Granted, the AAA market is looking kind of barren these days anyway, but that's all the more reason the casual audience has to just stick with Switch 1 instead.
Atlus isnt known for great performance tbf. Metaphor struggles on PS5. Even the pro you sometimes get minor dips of a frame or two
The console skew is looking weirder and weirder with the rumors too. Rumors are seeming to point for Xbox going for a "Luxury" end above even the PS6. Which I couldnt imagine what it would be like if we ended up with 3 main systems all with vastly different strength.
Only consistent part of the gaming industry is the growth of the PC market for that very reason. Buy once to play all past games and all future games (to the extent you're willing to upgrade or deal with slightly lesser performance). Switch/Switch 2 works well as a companion device, but doesn't stand on its own very well or for very long.
Truth be told, Elden Ring ran horribly on Steam Deck until Valve went in and began changing things with their own OS to get around it. FromSoftware is not known for their technical expertise. Switch 2 is all around stronger and more capable than a PS4 which Elden Ring runs on, so for there to be problems with the Switch 2 version in this case is not because of the hardware, but the developer.
It was more so changes to Proton, which ended up benefiting the performance of a lot of other games too, not just Elden Ring. We all know better than to expect those kinds of significant updates to Nintendo systems.
In docked mode sure, but in handheld mode it ends up being weaker than Steam Deck due to severely-reduced memory bandwidth, underclocked CPU, and less memory availability.
Again though, that argument begins to fall apart when we have apples-to-apples comparisons with other handheld systems, as well as examples of other software already running poorly on Switch 2. There's only so much you can blame on certain specific developers, and only in certain specific scenarios.
There's also the fact they also kneecapped themselves with the N64 by using cartridges and trying to make the 64DD a thing (in japan because nobody wanted it elsewhere) and the expansion pak that very few games actually used and gamecube by not using proper DVDs (not even as an addon like the og Xbox, just a japanese only Panasonic DVD player that also had GC hardware in it) and being tonedeaf at best when it came to changes in the industry, so even if it was "more powerful than the competition", it didn't mean much when you have to deal less storage and multiplats usually targeted the other consoles (with small execptions like Sonic Heroes, which targeted GC first) so you didn't even get much benefit anyways beyond the emulation of it that came later.
If you're not doing things the "legal" way, because even on Steam/GoG, there are still games that you have to hunt for physical copies (if the ages old DRM didn't already break by then forcing you to use a crack for it) because they arn't on any PC storefront, most modern PC cases don't even have 5.25" drive bays to put a DVD/Blu-Ray drive in, and relies on emulation to acomplish that for 5th/6th/7th generation console games that don't have PC ports or DOSBox (or a seperate drive that has DOS if you're insane) or emulators for every computer that doesn't use a processor that has the DNA of the Intel 8086 in it's instruction sets (so basically shit like the Amiiga or Atari ST)
Which in turn is changes to WINE, something that is needed for Windows applications to run on Linux at all (plus the possible benefits of being a translation layer perfrormance wise due to not needing every system call and all that), and DXVK being used to allow Vulkan to be used over DirectX, which can also be used on Windows for the same benefit because DXVK is a Windows DLL, so the only difference is some file trickery you have to do yourself instead of having it done for you on Linux through Steam or alternate launchers like the Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris. You are praising Valve for something they hired a few people who are familar with Open Source Software, which is the bare minimum for selling a x86 Linux machine of any kind and derriding Nintendo for basically doing the same form of backwards compatiblity they and Sony have been doing before the 9th gen when they didn't just abandon it where all it did was just let you play a previous gen console game on the new one and nothing more instead of providing some level of enhancement to try and get people to jumpt to the new console.
True, but your average Joe doesn't even need to venture outside of Steam to find everything they're looking for and then some, which is why it keeps breaking concurrent user counts. The vast majority of the PS4/PS5/Xbox One/Xbox Series library can all be found there.
You make it sound so quick and simple, yet nobody else was willing to make the monetary and time investment necessary to do it. That thin line is the difference between a consumer-friendly company and an anti-consumer company.
It was a problem with shader compilation and resource management within the game itself, and how they were initiated. Valve had to go around with a more aggressive shader caching system, when the dev could have fixed it within. More aggresive shader caching means more RAM allocated for it.
Steam Deck is still a PC at heart, so even with 16GB of RAM, the RAM is not unified like it is with consoles. It has to allocate a specific amount just for GPU purposes, which for that can be 1, 2, 4, or 8GB, leaving the 15, 14, 12, or 8GB remaining as main RAM. Taking just the general setting of 4GB, that leaves 12GB for main RAM (equivalent to Switch 2), but because the GPU can only access that smaller section, any game that needs more VRAM either won't run, or internally has to do aggressive swapping. So that means a copy of assets would need to be held in main RAM, and use bandwidth in order to swap. So even having 4GB more doesn't really make a difference.
The result though is that Steam Deck now uses pre-compiled shaders for nearly all games, not just Elden Ring, much like a console would. Again, beneficial to a wide range of titles.
Switch 2 only has 9GB of accessible RAM between GPU and CPU, as 3GB is reserved for the OS. Very inefficient relative to Linux.
Valve collects compiled shaders from users that have already done it on their system, which they then provide to others so they won't have to compile them themselves. But they are still based on compilation via drivers, which aren't necessarily optimized as they are derived from a language meant to be compiled to work on any architecture.
Okay, then let me ask you, what about everything else? the average joe would not be willing to configure an emulator since it's never going to be the convienent click the button to download and play like Steam. You're overestimating most people who would be classified under the zoomer or even Gen Alpha generations, even older generations of people like boomers don't even know what a filesystem is, let alone what an Operating System is under the hood, and even something as simple as "Drag this patched EXE file for your old that removes the DRM or let you play without the CD/DVD." or "put these folders into the game directory that will provide unoffical bug fixes and custom content or allow the game to fill more of the screen" if it's a game that ethier isn't on Steam or was not bought on Steam (GoG Mods are both too new to have a sizable catalog of mods to work with and only have a handful of popular mods for games known for thier modding scenes like the Elder Scrolls games with some execptions),
Because it was, WINE has been a thing for over 20 years, in due part because it was largely the same dev team responsible for it, and the community who maintained it ever since the dev team changed the license to LGPL in 2002 with corporate sponsorships like Google, Valve and and it's own home company CodeWeavers keeping things monetarily invested, which is a common thing for many Open Source Projects like the still in development Ladybird Browser, where other corporations pitch money to a core dev team behind the project while they and the community that formed around it actually do the work behind it.
For better or worse, the average Joe does not care about anything released two generations or more ago, and a lot of those titles get updated remasters/remakes anyway.
Which is the difference between WINE running maybe 15% of Steam games ten years ago to Proton now running 85%+. That's not nearly as insignificant as you make it out to be, and it's exponentially more effort than Nintendo has put in to helping developers get their games running on ARM. Valve views themselves as part of the PC gaming community, while Nintendo puts up as many barriers between themselves and their community as possible.
I say it's insignificant because being focused on games, it doesn't do much for literally everything else you would use WINE for, especially since WINE has been tested on hundreds of thousands of apps over it's 32 years of being maintained compared and not having to worry about of being on anything but x86, to the comparatively smaller thousands of games that have put on Steam, which also is "running" in the same way that WINE does being that the code it was forked from has been so heavily tested that Proton passively got the same benefits execpt again, the only difference being the changes they made to bolster game compatibility and DXVK being used alongside it on top of most games being made for x86 first, that 85% is a heavy overexageration given how many games have been made for PC that arn't on Steam or other storefronts, which would heavily lower that compatibility with how had to be done to use Proton's benefits out of Steam as seen through the aformentioned Heroic Games Launcher.
Developers who are actively trying to port a game that ran on x86 hardware to ARM should not need other companies who own the hardware that they're getting the game on to help them, especially since ARM is heavily used in smartphones and every game company has made a mobile port at some point, it shouldn't be that hard to find people who know how to develop in ARM, and most AAA game companies are getting worse at optimization on x86 devices as is, if they can't figure out how to optimize a game on x86, then no amount of help will make the port to ARM any more optimized.
I specifically said "Steam games." The people that care enough to find ways to get those other games running on Deck won't have trouble doing so either, EmuDeck gets you 99% of the way there.
Yeah, point being and long story short, Switch/Switch 2 just for Nintendo games, Steam Deck or PC for everything else. If you're gonna build a big digital library, at least do it a lot cheaper.
