Valve gives credit to Nintendo for opening up the market for their Steam Deck OLED.
As reported by NintendoLife, Valve product designer Greg Coomer revealed in a new interview, how Nintendo’s latest model of the Switch inspired their own moves in that direction:
“[The Switch OLED] definitely showed people that the fidelity of an OLED screen is just generally higher. It’s just a great product from Nintendo that makes a ton of customers around the world super happy.”
Of course, this revelation simply makes public what everyone already knew anyway. The Nintendo Switch and its success proved and created that there was a market for these gaming handhelds, that were capable of playing modern games.
While the Nintendo Switch itself isn’t capable of running the full range of modern games, a group of very talented developers managed to work with set budgets and the Switch’s hardware limitations to make a few impossible ports of these games. Those impossible ports include the likes of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Doom Eternal.
On one end, these demonstrated the technical capabilities of the Nintendo Switch. But more relevant to this conversation, this opened up the industry’s eyes that there was a demand for these kinds of games to be playable in this format. Some gamers may have been dismissive of the idea, saying that it would be easy to get a console to buy games cheap, or a PC, to play any game. There would even be people who would say a laptop would cover everything a PC gamer needed for portable play.
But the Switch demonstrated that all of these assumptions were wrong. Nintendo wouldn’t make a gaming PC portable device, for obvious reasons. However, other companies would be more than eager to take Nintendo’s place on this industry.
Today, we know of big companies like Valve, or OEMs like Lenovo and ASUS, entering into this market. However, even before their interest, many smaller companies, such as GPD and AYANEO, pitched such devices, some with even better specs than the Steam Deck.
These companies didn’t actually have the money to match Nintendo’s resources, so they had to use crowdfunding as the venue to launch production of these devices. But their pioneering work helped bring us to where we are today, with so many Windows gaming devices on offer.
On Nintendo’s part, the OLED was announced and released in 2021, and its success led Valve to conclude that they could also find the audience for such an arrangement on the Super Mario Bros Movie.
Now, we’re at the cusp of what’s likely a breakout moment for Valve, as they hope their newest hardware can be as successful for them as the OLED Switch was for Nintendo.
