Why I like the Switch OLED more than the Steam Deck

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Yes, I’m back again: the hapless fool who sold his Valve Steam Deck to buy a Nintendo Switch OLED model for his family (for his daughter, more than anyone). Several months after making this decision, what do I actually think of the Switch OLED? Was it worth giving up the Deck? Time for an illustrated review to find out!

The short answer is: yes. The Switch OLED gets a lot more play than the Steam Deck ever did. Sometimes the games we play need to inform the devices that we purchase, and given that my daughter is very much beholden to the Nintendo pantheon, it was a sensible move to buy a TV-ready Switch for games that our older Switch Lite simply wouldn’t manage comfortably. Or, more accurately, games that I didn’t want my daughter playing on the Switch Lite.

The upshot of moving to a TV Switch rather than an All Handheld, All the Time Switch is that my daughter’s gaming experiences have become a family bonding experience, rather than, as they were previously, a slightly antisocial affair.

The downside is that I now don’t have a dedicated emulation machine with which to play homebrew Game Boy games. The Steam Deck wins out over the Switch for the sheer breadth of different games that can be played, even if the Switch does the very specific, narrow type of game that our family plays together more than any other at the moment.

That said, the Steam Deck was absolute overkill for the kinds of retro games I like to play, and I think I’d probably be much better off with an emulation machine such as a Retroid Pocket or (my current obsession) a Miyoo Mini. More on this line of thought if I ever actually bite the bullet on purchasing one of these devices.

In the meantime, the one other big advantage I give the Steam Deck over the Switch OLED Model is that only one of these devices feels like it would withstand the bashing that a seven-year-old girl gives her games consoles, and it’s not the Nintendo-made device.

Rather paradoxically, the Steam Deck is the safest device to put into small hands, as it’s less likely that the screen will get scratched or the analogue sticks will get damanges, BUT, the Deck is less child-friendly in that it requires a bit of technical knowhow to get the most out of it.

And, yes, the Deck can technically play Nintendo Switch games – even those from Nintendo themselves, if you know what you’re doing and you don’t mind the legality of the situation. For a layman like myself who just wants to play Splatoon with his family, though, this isn’t a consideration. For all its hardware limitations, the Switch is the machine that has Mario Kart, so it’s the winner for this family.

Thanks for watching!