Valve don't exactly like to give out sales numbers, so we often have to make educated guesses but sometimes with huge hits like Black Myth: Wukong, it gives us a slightly clearer idea on how the Steam Deck is actually selling.

A particularly fun bit:

So then, how about Fortnite on Linux / Steam Deck? Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said when it hits “tens of millions of users” that it “would actually make sense to support it”. We must be pretty close by now right? Why ignore a platform that’s sold multiple millions, and is clearly just continuing to fly off the shelves?

  • Dudewitbow
    26·
    4 months ago

    because itd be a pain for devs to optimize for a platform if said platform changes too often. one of the benefits of a console is that the platforms life is about 7-9 years so both audience and devs dont have to worry much about having to go through the decision of deciding which generation to support.

    it would do a LOT of gen 1 steam deck buyers a disservice if a gen 2 one came out faster and a dev arbitrary targets the newer device as the baseline.

      • Dudewitbow
        6·
        4 months ago

        devs on pc have to decide which set of hardware to optimize for. it’s a step that they choose based on harwdare adoption trends. There is always a point where something is too hardware demanding that it would greatly hinder sales when making a decision. With a fixed hardware platform, devs have a concentrated point in hardware adoption to target.

        For instance, say you developed a game where the minimum hardware requirement was slightly higher than a steam deck. If enough steam deck sales exist, the dev might have an incentive to optimize the game more just to get access to said market.