My friend has had quite severe ill health, including some unfortunate, impromptu hospital trips. I bought them a Steam Deck as a gift, shortly before their health worsened, and it has literally been a lifesaver for them. It has been tremendously powerful for them to have a way to stay connected with their gaming friends, even when they can’t make it to their desk.
I don’t own a Deck myself, but this alone would make me a big fan (though I also appreciate that the Steam Deck has made streamline gaming on my Linux desktop)
Can confirm this.
I got my Steam Deck when I caught Corona and stopped getting better. By now I can’t leave my bed but with the Deck I can at least play something. Otherwise I would have gone insane by now.
For additional context, handheld PCs in general were estimated to have 6 mil in total sales during that period, so the steam deck is 2/3s of the market.
Some additional quotes from the source material:
“I think it’s amazing,” AMD gaming marketing boss Frank Azor tells me, discussing IDC’s numbers for handheld gaming PCs. “This didn’t exist three years ago; we went from nothing, zero, to incremental category creation in the millions of units.”
But out of those 6 million shipments, the lion’s share have been the Steam Deck itself, according to IDC’s estimates. All of the 2022 shipments are the Steam Deck, and Ward tells me upwards of 50 percent of the 2023 shipments and 48 percent of the 2024 shipments are the Deck as well. Doing the math, Valve has now shipped upwards of 3.7 million Steam Decks and has quite possibly crossed 4 million by now.
With as few as 2 million Windows handhelds shipping in two years, it’s not a huge surprise that AMD and Intel aren’t spending big on more custom chips like the one that’s still working perfectly well for the Steam Deck — particularly if the rumors are true that early Windows handheld buyers returned their purchases at unusually high rates. (Anecdotally, I’ve seen lots of open-box stock of the Asus ROG Ally when I’ve looked at Best Buy online and in-person.)
I have a LCD and Oled Steam deck, love them and use them often. I’m not a fan of Nintendo, or other non open systems, being a linux-pc guy, so don’t own nor have any interest in acquiring them. I hope Valve can improve on their market-share, and more open linux friendly devices find their niche in the market-place.
Valve is probably doing the two most important things in gaming right now:
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Setting a low-end benchmark for devs to build/optimize games to (“how well does it run on steam deck”)
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making gaming on Linux more readily available.
Both are critically needed, but like your other commenter, I would like to see more competition.
Unfortunately the competition isn’t as forward thinking as Valve. They are too busy trying to corner their little markets to build a larger more robust one with room for everyone. Petty, greedy, and low-brow.
I could see that changing. I think a lot of the other competitors went with Windows mostly because they either come from a legacy manufacturer (Lenovo, ASUS) or have been making handhelds longer than Valve (GPD).
But now that SteamOS is practical and able to actually run games i bet well see some shifts. Lenovo is already selling a SteamOS version of their Legion Go S handheld.
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I hope Valve can improve on their market-share
I wish someone would actually compete with Valve instead.
The Xbox handheld will make things worse. I wish there was another big competitor based on Linux.
If we’re assuming it’s at 4m sold steam decks then that is 2.65% of the sold Nintendo switches at 150.86m.
It’s interesting what different companies consider success. Apple sold far more iPhone Minis in 3 years and yet the phone is considered to have no market.
I wonder if other companies entering the handheld space, like Lenovo and Asus for instance, will see numbers like this and bail like they did last time they tried Steam Machines?
@Sunshine our family was responsible for 4 of those!
And we only have one nintendo switch in the house
I bought two steam decks of which one was at launch and the other was the limited edition OLED one. Both of which get daily use. My kids play them regularly. I play them regularly. If my wife wants to get another computer in the future, I would probably recommend she get something cheap and buy a steam deck to game on. It works quite well for northgard!
@_spiffy nice! Yeah I have the oled one too. It’s nice.
The kids got the base models, but I’ve upgraded all the internal drives
The LCD one is 512GB which hasn’t been an issue for them so far. They mostly just play valheim and portal/portal2, sticky business and snakeybus. I figure once they get older they will have access to more games and will need more space. But I’m hoping at that point they are involved financially in the purchase so they will have some control over what they get.
Inversed for my family. Three Switches (we’re planning on selling one) and one Steam Deck.
Got my Steam Deck a month ago, got Citron working yesterday and might put my (unpatched) Switch into storage soon…
