I bought a Wii U. It had some good games at the time, but Nintendo’s strategy over the last 10 years has just been to rerelease those games with better performance and new content. I wish I’d just waited.

I’m not sure about general reception, but I preordered the Steam Deck as soon as it went live and have been using mine for years, so it’s coming from personal experience. It’s okay for menus and light use, and there are definitely worse dpads out there, but I’m noticeably less accurate in 2D platformers than playing on PC or on Anbernic handhelds.

On mine, the diagonals are overly sensitive compared to the cardinal directions, and because of the mushy membrane (and glossy surface) there isn’t enough feedback to reliably stop those false diagonals. In platformers a diagonal input will often make you crouch and kill your momentum, so it can be a liability in certain games.

I hope they improved the dpad compared to the one on the Steam Deck. The Deck’s dpad feels quite mushy, and the glossy texture doesn’t help. I’d love a high quality controller with dual trackpads.

If this happens, there’s a good chance companies like Nintendo and Sony will double down on trying to erase emulation as an option. Anyone developing emulators will be targeted (even moreso than they already are), and ROM sites will be taken down making it harder for the average person to find games. Now is a great time to build up an offline ROM collection ahead of this potentially happening in a few years, even if storage is currently expensive.