Steam Deck: Nintendo Switch’s newest competitor

Steam is a digital marketplace and is owned by Valve Corporation. Valve Corporation has published numerous games but in recent years they have been trying to enter the space of hardware. On November 10, 2015 Valve launched its first game controller for connecting to PCs and their own Steam machines (A prebuilt PC developed by Valve which was designed to operate Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS via the Steam client). The Steam controller was discontinued in 2019 and with modest sales.

Steam deck is Valve’s foray into the handheld console space. The Handheld space is currently dominated by Nintendo Switch. With 84.59 million of units sold since its launch in 2017, Switch has been one of the most successful consoles in the current gaming generation. The most unique thing about Switch is that it can be switched from a handheld design to a home console with the help of a dock accessory.

Steam deck is essentially a PC on the go with very impressive hardware specifications. The handheld is equipped with a 7-inch diagonal display with 1200x800 pixels and 60 Hz refresh rate. It has an AMD APU (Processor) with Zen 2 architectures and 4 cores/8 threads. With 16GB LPDDR5 RAM and storage options ranging from 64GB eMMC($399) , 256GB SSD($ 529) and 512GB SSD($ 649).

Since the late 80s, Nintendo has been the reigning king in the portable gaming space. After the success of Switch, Nintendo revealed the new switch pro which has an OLED display upgrade. This will surely enhance the experience in the console but many were disappointed with no hardware upgrade. Nintendo Switch is still running an Nvidia Tegra custom chip which is severely underpowered and the console struggles to even play Nintendo’s core games with 30 FPS. This means that compromises have to be made to make a game run of the system. Another aspect is that the failure of Sony’s PS Vita (Sony’s portable handheld) failed against the Nintendo 3DS of the previous generation. Sony did not attempt to compete against Nintendo. This meant that there were no major competitors against Nintendo and the company has become somewhat complacent. The launch of Steam Deck also means that there is another competitor against the Switch and this will lead to healthy competition and ultimately it’s a win for the consumers. With 1.6 TFLOPS of GPU power its significantly more powerful than the Switch. Another point to be noted is the versatility that the Steam ex provides. The Deck essentially is a PC and this means that it runs on Valve’s version of Linux OS and by connecting it to a dock via a USB C and it also has full Bluetooth 5.0. This means that you can use it to hook the device up to a full-sized monitor and work on any productivity applications as well. Due to its open nature, even Windows can be installed on the deck. This means that it will be much more flexible than any of its competitors. There have been many recent smaller projects that have attempted a similar portable gaming PC, but Valve (Steam’s parent company) has a much deeper pocket and experience in its hands. The console will be shipped by the end of December 2021. There is no guarantee that this system will be a success but it surely will make the handheld space more exciting.

Video Game crash of 1983

In 1983 the video games industry was hit with a recession that almost ended the existence of video games of that time period. This period lasted for almost two years from 1983 to 1985. Many people and journalists who were critical were calling video gaming a fad. Numerous companies went bankrupt or stopped making video games entirely. This recession is known as the Great North American Video Game Crash or Atari Shock (Primarily in Japan).

Video games in the 1970s were dominated by arcade machines and by the end of the decade home game consoles were also getting popular. With the start of the 1980s, the video gaming industry witnessed a boom with numerous companies like Mattel, Atari, and Coleco dominating the market. The early 80s was a time of innovation and growth in the video game industry but there was instability in the industry as well. This was a time period when video games were becoming more mainstream and popular. Many new players entered the market ranging from industries to small developers that had no association or prior experience in game development in general.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System released on November 1990 (Successor to NES)

Pacman was a big hit in the early 80s and it was not of the most popular video games in the arcades. Its successor Miss. Pacman improved on the formula and was a success as well. After the success of Pacman in the arcades, Atari wanted to replicate the success in the home game consoles. But with the limited constraints with the memory and short development period, the game was not well received by the consumers and critics alike. In 1982 Atari also brought the license to release the video game of the movie for 21 million. The game was developed in a time period of only 5 weeks. The game was negatively received and only 1 million copies of the game were sold off the 5 million manufactured. Many of the sales were also returned to the retailers furthering the damage. During this period video games were being published by small developers with very poor quality and many big developers were producing games that were more of a marketing token than the game. There were many clones of the same games with little to no redeeming quality and replayability. There were also numerous consoles unlike today with too many options that were no different from one another. With the abundance of supply and low sales of games, retailers started to remove stocks of video games and this led to the shrinking of the industry. Atari had lost $500 Million in 1983 and had to cut its workforce from 10,000 employees to just 400 employees.

During the 1980s there was a boom in the Personal Computers market as well. The PCs were much more powerful than consoles and they could play games and do many tasks like word processing and spreadsheets. The PC industry was unaffected by this low point of video game consoles.

In 1985 Nintendo Corporation launched the Nintendo Entertainment systems in North America and Nintendo ensured that only a limited number of games to be released under their license agreement. This ensured a certain threshold of quality for the games that were released for the system and Nintendo emerged out of the survivor from the video game crash. The Nintendo Corporation started to dominate the video game industry with an assurance of quality that was unmatched by any other corporation at that time. Many other entrants like SEGA also emerged after the crash. Nintendo with its approach and license and quality assurance of video games has left a big impact on the industry to this date. Video games industry has only grown since then and also overtaken other source of entertainment. Nintendo can be credited to provide the industry a trajectory that was severely needed after the crash of 83.

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The Story of the Best Selling Video Game of all time: Tetris

Tetris has its origin in the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre (Research Lab). It was one of the foremost research institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, located in St Petersburg, Soviet Union (Now Russia). Created by software researcher Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, Tetris is a simple tile-matching game that took the world by storm upon it’s release.

It was developed for Electronika 60, which was a computer, made in the Soviet Union. This period was the final stage of the Cold war Era and computers were becoming more popular as well.

The game wasn’t intended as a commercial product just like the creation of the music record. But it was to be distributed freely among academic institutions around the Soviet Union and the economic bloc of countries aligned with the USSR in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas that demonstrated use cases for the software.

As USSR was a communist state, so Pajitnov did not technically own the program as the game was under the ownership of the state. Pajitnov along with the help of a colleague, Dmitry Pavlovsky, and a teen computer programmer, Vadim Gerasimov continued to work on the game project even though commercializing it would have been a risky move under the Soviet government. Gerasimov further ported the game from the old and bulky Elektronika 60 to the more widely used (IBM) compatible PCs.

As Elektronika 60 had no graphics output, the individual blocks in the game were made of different text, but with the port in PC, they were able to support color graphics. This brought the game to life.

Pajitnov and Gerasimov had started distributing Tetris for (PC) in 1985 among their friends and colleagues in various math or computer conventions. Soon the sharing spread and the game was smuggled outside USSR to Hungary. During mid-80s U.S and Japan had a more prevalent console market whereas, in Europe, gaming was primarily done on computers. There was a non-existent software market in Russia and most software was usually copied in floppy disks.

Welcome screen of 1987 version of Tetris

In 1986 Robert Stein, a salesman from the UK-based software company Andromeda spotted Tetris at Hungary’s Institute of Computer Science. He was convinced by the potential of the software and he struck an agreement with Pajitnov to sell the games internationally. But legally Tetris was still under the ownership of the Soviet government. There was one problem, the agreement was only for the PC and not for any other platform and Stein has struck a deal with Sega to launch the game on their platform. Later Henk Rogers, another salesman from the Netherlands wanted to find a good launch game for the Nintendo’s new Game Boy handheld. The Soviet government was not happy with the Stein deal. But Rogers convinced the Soviet government and they agreed and he also formed a good relationship with Pajitnov. Later Andromeda’s license of Tetris was deemed illegal. Nintendo was given the right to launch the game on its console. The GameBoy was a platform to showcase one of the first video games exported from Russia. The game was a commercial hit and it has been ported to the most number platforms to date. The game also holds the record as the best-selling game of all time. In 1996, Pajitnov was able to reclaim the ownership of the rights and formed the Tetris Company, along with Henk Rogers. Even though he missed collecting the potential royalties for Tetris which were over hundreds of millions, he was still able to secure the future royalties.

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The all new Nintendo Switch OLED Model.

The Japanese gaming company Nintendo has launched its trendy version of the Switch gaming console, called the switch (OLED model). As for the key highlights, the tool comes with a bigger 7.0-inch OLED display in conjunction with an upgraded NVIDIA chipset and superior audio system. It carries a charge tag of $349.99 (around Rs. 26,000) and is to be had in two color options.

The Nintendo Switch OLED model — which was released on July 6, 2021 — is similar to the normal Nintendo switch that was released in March 2017. It is a hybrid console that swaps without problems from hand-held mode to television mode. There are pleasure-Con on both aspects of the console, which might be similar to those at the normal Switch. It plays all the same old switch video games, has the equal processor, battery, RAM, and most different specifications.

However, Nintendo upgraded and more advantageous a selection of capabilities of the console to make it higher (greater on that in the subsequent section). This makes the console advanced to the normal Switch and the hand-held-only switch Lite. It does now not make it a switch pro or switch 2, though, because it’s no longer modified that a lot.

New Nintendo Switch OLED specifications-

	Switch OLED	Original Switch
Display	7-inch OLED touchscreen	6.2-inch LED touchscreen
Resolution	720p handheld/1080p docked	720p handheld/1080p docked
Storage	64GB (expandable)	32GB (expandable)
Chipset	Custom Nvidia Tegra X1	Custom Nvidia Tegra X1
Battery Life	Approx. 4.5 – 9 hours	Approx. 4.5 – 9 hours
Connectivity	USB-C, 3.5mm audio, microSD, wired LAN	USB-C, 3.5mm audio, microSD
Size	9.5 x 4 x 0.55 inches	9.4 x 4 x 0.55 inches
Weight	Approx. 0.93 pounds	Approx. 0.88 pounds

lamentably, the Nintendo Switch OLED remains lacking some things we would hope a brand new Switch console could have. For a start, the joy-Cons are the same as the present-day Nintendo switch, which means they may (and we strain could) fall victim to Joy-Con drift that has blighted the controllers of the authentic Switch.

There may be also no aid for Bluetooth headphones, which with stellar headsets like the Sony WH-100XM4 available, appears to be a rather disappointing omission with the Switch OLED. simply bear in thoughts, the identical workarounds for wireless headphones used in the unique switch ought to paintings with the Switch OLED.

However, arguably the maximum disappointing thing is the Switch OLED does not provide a lift in overall performance over the authentic switch. It makes use of the same custom Nvidia Tegra X1 gadget-on-a-chip with reputedly no specs modifications, which means a shape of 4K output while docked or 1080p when treated isn’t always to be had.

All it is no longer to mention the Nintendo switch OLED is flawed, however, it cannot be a must-have for those who are already playing the present-day Switch.

The new adjustable stand and LAN-

The bigger and adjustable stand is arguably the most compelling upgrade for the brand new Switch after the OLED show. The single-role stand on the original Switch changed into instead skimpy and flimsy and often toppled over on the merest wobble.

The broader stance at the switch OLED seems lots more stable and the larger display method it can make for a wi-fi new portable console that can be legitimately installation everywhere for a bit of Mario Kart or damage Bros local multiplayer.

And speaking of multiplayer, the Nintendo switch OLED also has a LAN port to guide a stressed-out internet connection for extra stable online gaming. that would be available for people in homes with patchy Wi-Fi.

Nintendo Switch OLED Pricing and availablity-

The Nintendo Switch (OLED model) is priced at $349.ninety-nine (around Rs. 26,000). it’ll be to be had for buy within the US from October 8 onwards. information concerning its availability in different markets is doubtful as of now.

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