alt Hacker Newshow do you figure the steam deck "sells" that many "games"?
most of the top steam charts are free to play.
about 1/5th of all active players on Steam are playing Valve's first party titles.
it sells games, yes. but is it selling games the way a switch does? no.
I like the open platform model more myself (steam deck), but to ignore the trade offs both models present is a bit disingenuous.
One of the major reasons they raised the price on the steam deck is because it is an open platform. Since they have no guarantee you will ever buy or run steam software on the machine they need to make a profit on the hardware.
Nintendo is ECSTATIC to sell its console hardware at a loss to gain market share and software lock-in. This makes it much easier for someone trying to enter the hand-held console market to get decent hardware at a good price.
Like I said, I think the Steam model is more consumer friendly at the end of the day, but lets not act like both models don't have ups and downs for both the company and the consumer.