The price reductions on the nintendo eshop aren't really that enticing in comparison. So you have to pay pretty high prices for games or have to search on the second hand market to buy games cheaper.

On Steam, Gog and Epic you get good deals every day. Those crazy 1000+ game collections from Steam users aren't there without reason. Games are often so cheap on Steam that you buy them even when you have 10 other games in the backlog you would rather play before.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 0 points 4 days ago

Yeah, well, that's not really a good thing in my book. You also arguably don't need a thousand games you're not gonna play. One of the things I'd like to see this gen on the Switch 2 is more curated discoverability and less shovelware.

I think your argument will make more or less sense depending on how the physical market eveolves. The price bump for physical is a bummer, but this generation it's been very easy to find cheap physical copies, both new and used.

At the end of the day, PC handhelds are like PCs, you tend to pay more for the hardware (only the very cheapest LCD version of the Deck is cheaper than the Switch 2, and multiple specs are actually worse) and on consoles you get more affordable hardware but typically more expensive games, at least day one.

So at worst the Switch 2 is... you know, a console. The pricing of the hardware is by far the least egregious pricing choice in this whole thing. If anything, the Switch 2 feels weirdly standard for Nintendo's typical strategy. They have a tendency to sell very old hardware at some profit instead of subsidizing it. This feels weirdly comparable to the PC handheld segment.