The Steam Deck may have sold a few million copies (four or five from what I hear?), but it’s nowhere near the hundreds of millions of Switches, even in sale pace nowadays.
And yet monthly active Steam users are about the size of all Switches sold over its lifetime, including those who bought multiple Switches as new SKUs came out. I think what the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs capture are people who want to play PC games and play them handheld. Every Switch is handheld, but how many people are they capturing, or will they soon capture, that care very little about Nintendo games and just want to play games handheld? I have a feeling that the “port everything to the Switch” crowd won’t really exist anymore in a world where that game already plays on a similarly-priced PC handheld without having to beg the developers first.
And yet monthly active Steam users are about the size of all Switches sold over its lifetime, including those who bought multiple Switches as new SKUs came out. I think what the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs capture are people who want to play PC games and play them handheld. Every Switch is handheld, but how many people are they capturing, or will they soon capture, that care very little about Nintendo games and just want to play games handheld? I have a feeling that the “port everything to the Switch” crowd won’t really exist anymore in a world where that game already plays on a similarly-priced PC handheld without having to beg the developers first.