Steam Deck sold about 3 million units; Playstation 5 about 30 million, X-Box about 20 million, Nintendo Switch about 130 million. Steam has about 120 million active accounts.
I mean, it's successful I guess, but also not exactly taking over the world.
The Steam Deck is a success compared to previous attempts by Valve, but perhaps not as much as the initial excitement would have you believe. To put things into perspective, some source[1] estimates that a total of 3 million Steam Deck units will have been sold by the end of 2023. The Nintendo Switch, which probably inspired the Steam Deck, has sold 125 million units by March[2]. This amounts to 20.8 million units per year.
The Deck certainly is, it's sold out into 2023.
People want PC games on the go, Valve provides it in a now common form factor, at a reasonable price, with a trusted name.
There are a few other devices, but they're all so expensive that they don't matter. Microsoft is probably not worried by the Steam Deck, since its sales numbers seem to be quite modest (1 to 2 million units, as they guess in the piece).
They're looking at browser traffic. I assume people don't do a lot of web browsing with Steam Decks (maybe I'm wrong, never used one), so they're probably not being counted.
Some data I found on the internet suggests Apple ships about 6 million Macs per quarter, and they're at around 15% market share in the stats linked here. Other data I found on the internet leads me to guess Valve has sold around 3 million Steam Decks in the 2 years since they launched.
So my guess is that if you factored Steam Decks into this they'd account for about another 1% - very roughly.
Almost no-one here could give the number of Steam Decks sold after a full year because tech circles and even this Linux gaming and Steam fan site are finally starting to realize that even if Steam had released them, the numbers would be just embarrassingly low; signifying waining interest and struggling to compete against the other games consoles.
Thus, it is easy to assume [0][1] that it has performed extremely badly against the incumbents and isn't remotely a serious competitor. Any sort of magic numbers on sales or such clams without references or links can easily be dismissed.
Several comments addressing the likely change in the bug side of the statement over the past 4 years, but I'm also very curious how the Steam Deck has changed the sales side of it. While I doubt it's anywhere close to a majority, my guess is that it's a lot more than 0.8% these days.
Huh? I don't even think there Are official Steam Deck sales numbers. The best I can find was that they shipped over 1 million last October, not sold. But that was actually not long after they BEGAN shipping units. Not only that, but we're comparing it to the Switch, which is one of THE best selling game consoles ever. However, in its first year, IIRC, it actually "only" sold around 10 million units. That suggests that in its first year, the Steam Deck sold at least around 10% of what the Switch sold (although the deck was a lot more supply constrained, so it may have been higher if not for that.)
Since Valve doesn't share actual numbers, or at least has not done so yet, it's really hard to judge, but I think you're painting a picture that is at least a bit too pessimistic. I don't know if Valve actually expected to outsell stalwart console vendors, but I would actually guess they DID outsell the PS Vita's first year. That's really not too bad for a foray into a saturated market with a somewhat niche and admittedly even somewhat immature product.
Steam Deck probably has a bright future, but I'm most interested to hear if they had any success breaking into the market in Asia, as it seemed like that was a big push for them and probably generally one of the hardest markets for Valve/Steam, for a variety of different reasons. I have to guess the sales numbers in North America are pretty good based on how quickly we went through the preorders.
I know they mention Steam Deck but I expect it’s heavily skewing the results. I wonder what percent of linux gamers are accounted for by the Steam Deck. I expect it’s rather large.
That being said, Steam Deck probably sells more games than, for example, the Steam Controller did. Probably sells more games than their VR headset did too.
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