I’m just saying Nintendo’s demonstrated to be very dogged and creative at suing people, and the Deck is a direct competitor to the Switch in ways that a gaming laptop is not.
I love competition and think the Deck is absolutely fantastic, I can just easily imagine Nintendo making an argument (way less crazy than many they have successfully made).
Nintendo DMCAs rando YouTubers, but that’s very different from suing Valve. They’ll talk to their attorneys, be told they have no standing to sue, and then not do anything.
The idea that Nintendo would try to sue a company for making a handheld computer “because it can play pirated Switch games” is “Sony will buy Microsoft” levels of dumb and uninformed.
That said, having actually used emulators on my Steam Deck, it’s not actually a great experience unless you either exclusively use desktop mode (which is what I have to do any time I want to play a GBA game) or go down the “create a separate launcher for every game” route that the current tutorials for Switch emulation use, which is extremely tedious if you’re looking at emulating a platform where you have dozens of different games you want to have at your fingertips.
Also:
The lifetime hardware sales of the Switch passed those of the PS4 a few months back, and basically every Switch sold has made a profit on the hardware. There are six Switch games with over 20 million copies sold, compared to a combined total of zero* across PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. Somehow I don’t think “people have Switch emulation up and running to a satisfactory degree to run most games at playable speeds, five years after the system came out” is the strategic blunder you make it out to be.
*noting that it’s basically impossible to find current or correct sales numbers for companies that don’t release that info anymore, which is basically everyone except the console manufacturers, but also that the only game that reasonably could be on this list otherwise is Grand Theft Auto V
I didn’t say it was a stake in Nintendo’s heart, just a problem with their strategy. And it is.
Like I posted earlier, there’s some program that handles setting up everything for you, it does everything other than getting the ROM files. Uses a gamepad UI.
My main opinion of Nintendo’s litigiousness is that they usually aim down (like, way, waaay down). I can see them pursuing the emulator devs way before I’d see them trying to take on Valve. BUT America’s copyright laws are so batshit nowadays I’d hardly write off the idea as completely crazy.
It’s also simply not in Valve’s interest to take a loss on hardware that won’t be primarily used as a platform for Steam. (This is all imaginary hypothetical talk anyway. Anyone got their Steam Decks this month?)