This article includes sales estimates for different handhelds from market research firm IDC.
They place total handheld PC sales of the Steam Deck, RoG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw at almost 6 million units for the past 3 years. It’s estimated that the Steam Deck makes up between 3.7 to 4 million of those sales, more than all the other major handheld PC manufacturers combined.
Their approach leaves me with conflicting feelings.
On one hand, I dislike how the Steam Deck is among the weaker offerings for performance. On the other hand, I appreciate that it’s not a commodified device like phones, which keep increasing in price with only miniscule incremental improvements year over year.
It wouldn’t be as conflicting if they had better competitors following the yearly-improvement business model, as that would give more of a choice for those who prefer buying a new device each year. But, at least right now, the competing devices are pretty shit. None of them have dual track pads and 4 back buttons in addition to the standard inputs, and they’re all running Windows 11 with a bloatware bandage to cover up the fact that the OS is far from controller-friendly.
Honestly the Steam Deck could never become more powerful and I would be perfectly fine with it. Hardware reliability, ecosystem maturity and quality of life features are what actually matters. The deck already can run several lifetimes of indy games and that is just going to grow.
Chasing performance to improve Steam Deck sales I think is a subpar play, though that being said more powerful hardware is always welcome.
Honestly the pc gaming market (excluding indies) has an irrational obsession on focusing only on making performance heavy games with extremely taxing system requirements, the Steam Deck blowing up in popularity with its subpar hardware is honestly one of the best things that could happen to the pc gaming industry.
I agree completely. I would love if the popularity of mid-range handheld devices like the SD convinced more companies to steer away from the obsession with ever increasing graphical fidelity.
It’s also nice having a handheld PC that is so reasonably priced in comparison to a lot of the other offerings in the handheld PC market.