4 Things I Wish Nintendo Would Learn From the Steam Deck's Success

howtogeek.com:

The amount of time I've spent sitting in a van would drive most people to madness, but it was made bearable by the glow of Nintendo's handheld consoles. Recently, however, I've found myself reaching for my Steam Deck more than my Switch, and I'm not the only one.

The innovation and nostalgic warmth of Nintendo has been replaced by the sheer power of Valve's portable PC-gaming beast. With whispers of Nintendo's follow-up growing, here are some lessons I wish the company would learn from the success of the Steam Deck. If it does so, it just might keep the next Nintendo handheld in my hands and not in my backpack.

1 Properly Prepare Your Product for the Present

Innovation comes at a cost. With the Switch's power and hardware specs falling significantly shorter than the previous generation of consoles, the future of Nintendo was half-a-decade behind out of the gate. As modern gaming becomes more graphically intensive and technologically advanced, this lack of power is more and more evident. The Switch's capabilities often mean that developers must downgrade their games to fit the console's limitations.

I was one of the unlucky souls who picked up the—now infamous—Switch port of Rocksteady's Batman beat-em-up Arkham Knight on release day. Even in its significantly truncated graphical form, it was a buggy, barely playable mess that even a patch two-thirds the size of the game was unable to fix.

Valve's Steam Deck boasts modern AMD architecture capable of running games at higher resolutions and frame rates than the last console generation. It isn't that the Steam Deck is just more powerful than the Switch, Valve made sure that its handheld wasn't immediately outclassed by fading hardware. The release of the OLED Switch was a marked improvement but Nintendo should take further measures to future-proof, well, present-proof their hardware.

2 Let Me Play the Games I Want to Play

If you want to play classic Nintendo games from the SNES, N64, Game Boy and other