Handheld gaming console battle — What you can get in South Africa

There are six handheld gaming systems officially available to buy in South Africa in early 2024.

In the past few years, hardware improvements in smartphones and a boom in the mobile gaming ecosystem have somewhat displaced the need for dedicated portable gaming machines.

However, the Nintendo Switch’s dominance in console sales — handily beating its PlayStation and Xbox rivals for several years running — shows that many people are still interested in such devices.

Significant performance and power efficiency improvements in mobile chips from both AMD and Intel have also made portable gaming PCs much more capable.

These offer a much wider selection of games than Nintendo’s popular handheld.

There has recently been an explosion in portable gaming PCs, due in no small part to the Linux-powered Valve Steam Deck launching in 2022.

The second generation of this much-praised handheld will feature an OLED screen, which has already been announced. However, it has yet to launch in South Africa.

The first major PC vendor to release a Windows-based offering in South Africa was Asus, which rolled out the ROG Ally in mid-2023.

While the Steam Deck already supported numerous games through the Proton interoperability, the Ally has native support for all games available on Windows.

MSI is set to roll out the second major Windows-powered portable gaming system to South Africa — the Claw — in April 2024. It will start at R17,999.

MyBroadband compiled a list of all the handheld gaming consoles or PCs available to buy directly in South Africa.

The PlayStation Portal and Logitech G Cloud Cloud were excluded from our list because they are not capable of functioning as a standalone gaming device.

The Portal must be on the same Wi-Fi network as a PlayStation 5 console and use that system’s hardware to render content that is streamed to its screen.

The Logitech G Cloud requires a game streaming like Nvidia’s GeForce Now to play games.

Both are game streaming systems with networking hardware, a screen, and a built-in controller, rather than gaming consoles.

Below we have summarised the specifications and prices of the six handheld gaming consoles available in South Africa.

Asus ROG Ally — Z1 from R9,999 | Z1 Extreme from R11,999 (Asus Online Store South Africa)

MSI Claw A1M — From R17,999

Nintendo Switch — From R7,990 (Takealot)

Nintendo Switch Lite — From R4,815 (Takealot)

Nintendo Switch OLED — From R7,999 (Nintendo Online Store South Africa)

Valve Steam Deck — From R11,757 (Wootware)