Nintendo has always had competition with superior hardware in the handheld department. The Sega Nomad, WonderSwan, and Playstation Vita were all good examples of that. Nintendo products being much cheaper are always what keeps them ahead with handheld consoles.
It doesn’t hurt that they also have a plethora of decent fist party franchises to put on their system. Other companies just get generic third party games that you can also play on PC
The biggest difference between then and now is that the switch was the first handheld that could reasonably play (some) full scale open world console games. Any handheld trying to compete before that effectively needed games specifically developed for it with limited scope. There wasn’t really the vibrant PC indie scene for easy ports to low spec hardware either, and the Switch was also the first to really court those.
These handheld PCs are pretty much the first time there’s competition with a big library to be a real alternative. Before now, it would have also taken partnering with studios to convince them to port games to your device.
Nintendo has always had competition with superior hardware in the handheld department. The Sega Nomad, WonderSwan, and Playstation Vita were all good examples of that. Nintendo products being much cheaper are always what keeps them ahead with handheld consoles.
It doesn’t hurt that they also have a plethora of decent fist party franchises to put on their system. Other companies just get generic third party games that you can also play on PC
Ehhhh define “much”
The biggest difference between then and now is that the switch was the first handheld that could reasonably play (some) full scale open world console games. Any handheld trying to compete before that effectively needed games specifically developed for it with limited scope. There wasn’t really the vibrant PC indie scene for easy ports to low spec hardware either, and the Switch was also the first to really court those.
These handheld PCs are pretty much the first time there’s competition with a big library to be a real alternative. Before now, it would have also taken partnering with studios to convince them to port games to your device.