What Is Switch vs. Steam in less than 773 words.

What You Need to Know

• /switch-vs-steam checks every Switch price against Steam's, pulled fresh once a day from both storefronts.
• Pick your own country from the region dropdown first. Steam prices are locked to wherever you actually pay, so the comparison only works once it's using your real region.
• The "Switch (cheapest)" column shows the best price across every country I track, reachable because a Nintendo account can switch storefront regions and a Steam account can't.
• Every individual game page also carries its own Steam row, so you can check one title without opening the full table.

Why I built this

Today, A Steam Deck starts at $789, a steep price thanks to the hardware hype recently. So when Steam runs one of its big sales and my feed fills up with people's $4 backlog games, I get a little jealous. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

There's also the time my brother and I finally bought Cult of the Lamb on the eShop, after months of watching its price move on both platforms. I played it for maybe 2 hours and stopped. Worth it? Still not sure.

That's the actual problem. I sit on the fence between Switch and Steam most days, and i know out there, there's a lot of people like me. So I built the one thing that save your time and satisfies your ego: a page that just checks the real prices on both platform Nintendo eShop and Steam.

Where the numbers come from

Every price on that page comes from two places, the Nintendo eShop and Steam, pulled fresh once a day. Nothing scraped from a resale site. Nothing estimated from last month's sale.

One thing worth knowing before you read the table. Steam doesn't sell to every country directly. A few smaller markets don't get their own Steam listing, so those rows show the nearest region Steam actually uses, marked "via DE" or "via US" so you know it's a stand-in and not your local price.

It's exactly what's on the page

All of that, lined up side by side, lives at /switch-vs-steam. A table. Two prices per game. That's the whole trick, and I'd rather undersell it here than have the page do the disappointing part later.

How to actually use it

The comparison table

The top of the page tells you how many Switch games are cheaper than Steam in your region right now, plus the max and average savings and a timestamp for when it last updated. It's a live number, not a figure I typed in once and forgot about.

Start with the "Your Steam region" dropdown. Steam accounts are locked to wherever you actually pay, so the comparison only means something once it's using your real country.

Then there are two Switch columns, and this is the part worth slowing down for. "Switch (your region)" is what you'd pay from your own eShop today, directly comparable to your Steam price. "Switch (cheapest)" is the best Switch price across every country I track, and you can actually get there: a Nintendo account can switch its storefront region. A Steam account can't. That gap between the two columns is the real find on this page.

Every column sorts. Click a header for savings or price, high to low or back again. On a phone, the table collapses into stacked cards carrying the same two savings numbers, so browsing it in a checkout line loses you nothing. There's a footnote on the page itself that explains the region-fallback labels in more detail than I'll repeat here.

The Steam row on every game page

I prepared this because maybe you already know which game you want to buy.

Open any individual game and Steam gets its own row in the price table, always in the 4th row, a thin blue line down the left edge so it reads differently from the eShop rows on purpose. The price shown is yours, your own Steam region, refetched automatically if you switch countries on the page.

Next to it sits a small delta against your best eShop price, a few dollars either direction. When Switch wins that particular game, a "🔥 Cheaper on Switch" badge shows up next to the Steam label. Click it and you land back on the full comparison table. A "View" link on the row takes you straight to the actual Steam store page.

One more thing

I'm not stopping at one page. Every quarter, I'll run a proper Switch-vs-Steam price analysis off the same data this page pulls from, tracking how the gap between the two moves over time. Stay tuned.

Lynch.