Game On: Sudden surge of portable gaming devices suggests healthy handheld market

Created by electronics brand Asus, the ROG Ally was released on June 13 to mostly positive reviews. Although handheld game consoles are hardly new, there was an noticeable lull in their production prior to the surprising success of the Steam Deck last year. Nintendo has always been the dominating force in handheld gaming, with all other competitors struggling to stay afloat.

When the PlayStation Vita struggled for years before being discontinued in 2019 with no plans for a successor, it felt like Nintendo had at long last created a true monopoly on handhelds. Sony had lost, and Microsoft knew better than to challenge Nintendo. Last year, it was Valve, the Bellevue-based company behind the Steam Store – where an estimated 50-70% of PC games are bought – stepping up to challenge Nintendo’s monopoly.

But the Steam Deck isn’t exactly a direct competitor to the Nintendo Switch. The Switch is designed with couch co-op gaming in mind and hosts dozens of exclusive titles, while the Steam Deck merely enables gamers to play all their PC games on the go. Evidently that niche use is enough for the Deck to recently pass the 3 million sales mark, and now hardware manufacturers like Asus, Ayaneo and Gamepad Digital are jumping in to compete.

The Asus ROG Ally, Ayaneo 2 and GPD Win Max all tout superior hardware specs over the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch. Beyond the obvious drawbacks of decreased battery life and much higher price point – all of these are $699 or more versus the Deck’s $399 and Switch’s $249 – these companies are missing the point of handhelds and need to take a history lesson.

Time after time, competitors have entered the handheld video game market with top-of-the-line graphics and nevertheless been trounced by inferior hardware. Sega’s 8-bit Game Gear made the Nintendo Gameboy’s green-tinted dot-matrix screen look laughable. The Playstation Portable was miles ahead of the Nintendo DS – same for the PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS.

And those are just the more prominent examples – the Neo Geo Pocket, Atari Lynx and Nokia N-Gage all sold far worse. Despite being more powerful than whatever Nintendo was offering at the time, Nintendo won in sales by leaps and bounds. That’s because the most important quality for a handheld game system is its accessibility and ease of use.

Nintendo has always excelled there – the original Game Boy had outstanding battery life and the Nintendo DS brought intuitive touchscreen controls to handheld gaming for the first time. And until the Switch, Nintendo’s handhelds were always backwards-compatible, encouraging consumers to upgrade to their next device every generation.

While it remains to be seen whether the Steam Deck will solidify itself as a staple handheld or fade into obscurity, the recent surge in direct competitors seems to suggest it’s doing well. It’s still a niche product though, and I’m surprised other tech companies are dog-piling at the opportunity to grab some tiny slice of an already-small pie.

That said, competition is almost always good for the consumer, pushing companies to offer the best product they can. And that pressure is exactly why I believe the Steam Deck will continue to thrive amidst newfound competition – it runs its own operating system, a Linux-based “Steam OS” that Valve updates constantly.

Competitors like the ROG Ally and Ayaneo 2 run Windows, which makes for quick and easy game compatibility. But it also means that in the foreseeable future, they could find themselves forced to drop ongoing support and software updates – after all, Microsoft won’t prioritize how well the latest Windows updates work with a niche handheld device.

These Steam Deck competitors are essentially very small gaming laptops – easy to manufacture and even easier to abandon. Valve is actively involved in the ongoing development of their Steam OS even outside of the Deck, which makes me as a consumer more confident they won’t abandon their handheld the moment sales start to slouch.

Of the recent slew of handhelds, the ROG Ally is by far the most impressive. Asus’ excellent screen manufacturing clearly carries over to their handheld, which boasts a 7-inch 1080p LCD display with a variable refresh rate up to 120 Hz. The device retails for $699 online and in-stores at Best Buy.

Riordan Zentler can be reached at riordanzentler@gmail.com.