The Steam Deck May Be Most Beneficial to Fighting Game Tournaments

gamerant.com:

Organizing larger fighting game tournaments, especially from the perspective of the grassroots fighting game community, can be a logistical nightmare. Tournament organizers have to rely on the support and passion of the community, who oftentimes dedicate their own consoles, monitors, and devices to help run the event. Throughout the years, that's involved lugging things as small as Xbox 360 or PS4 consoles, to as big as arcade machines filling up various venues across the world. The hardware used to run fighting game tournaments has continued to change and evolve over time, but the potential of Valve's Steam Deck for fighting game tournaments could be huge.

Tournament organizers have long been beholden to factors like version/hardware parity, fighting game publishers, and console exclusivity making the actual running of tournaments more difficult. Basically every Street Fighter 5 or Guilty Gear Xrd tournament was run using PlayStation 4 consoles, since those games were exclusive to Sony's hardware. However, most fighting game releases (including console-exclusive titles) were released on PC/Windows as well. Obviously lugging a giant gaming PC to a tournament is unsustainable, and gaming laptops are too expensive for a substitute, but the Steam Deck could be the ideal hardware for organizing tournaments.

Valve Has Multiple 'Pretty Exciting' Games in Development Right Now

While Xbox players get left out of several of the most popular console fighting game releases, ports to Windows often allow PC players to bypass any console exclusivity. Games like the aforementioned Street Fighter 5 and Guilty Gear Strive are PlayStation console exclusive, but are also available on PC. Outside of console exclusivity, most of the popular