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.
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.
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.
I wonder if the Steam Deck might challenge that. It's already sold more units than I think anyone really expected. It has a library and other capabilities that no console maker can ever hope to match while retaining consoles' convenience.
Asking a question with another question without answering mine directly isn't a good way to start a conversation.
It's really a genuine question since it is true that Steam doesn't reveal their Steam Deck sales and figures on this, yet we are already assuming it is a 'success' without benchmarking their performance against the existing generation of gaming consoles.
Assuming you have the figures, do you know what they are and how it compares to the current generation of games consoles on the market?
The Switch is the fifth best selling console of all time. That's not at all a fair comparison, especially given the difference in price point and how long the Switch has been on the market.
On the other hand, it's plausible that the Steam Deck could hit within 50% of Vita, the Wii U or Gamecube, which is amazing for Valve's second push into the console market, and immensely profitable, given Valve owns pretty much the only avenue with which people will be buying games for it and gets a 30% cut, on top of the Deck being significantly more expensive than any comparable console, now or historically.
It would be a flop for a traditional console, but the Steam Deck isn't a console, it's a PC. The reason that consoles need massive sales is because consoles have a limited repertoire of games (at best, they might be backwards-compatible with the previous-generation console), so they need large sales to demonstrate an install base and convince developers to make games for the platform. But if you're compatible with PC software, you don't care about that. Valve doesn't need to entice anyone to make PC games; the install base for the Steam Deck is the entire PC market. And with the help of emulators, a PC has access to multiple orders of magnitude more games than any existing console.
So the metric for success for the Steam Deck isn't to compare it to a console, rather it's to compare it to other specific PC form factors (e.g. a specific model of laptop).
I do like it, but I like a lot of things I would consider niche and that dont have impacts on large markets. I was wondering what they meant about impact on the gaming market. It's not clear to me how many steam decks have been sold in comparison to say, the nintendo switch. Which is why when they talk about impact I'm just not sure what the impact is.
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.
> My wild guess is that there’s between 1 and 2 million units already shipped out there.
While there was a lot of initial hype around the Steam Deck, it almost sounded as if it emerged as a serious Switch competitor. Unfortunately that didn't happen. Its sales are around an order of magnitude below the Switch, which sold 13.12 million units in its first year (and 122.5 million total).
So despite its modest success, the Steam Deck is still somewhat a niche product. Many people likely haven't even heard of it. I'm puzzled why Valve doesn't want to sell it in stores.
Note that it doesn't need nearly as high sales to be profitable. With a traditional console, you can only play games specifically made for the console, so if you don't sell 10s of millions of units, there won't be games for it. The steam deck can play anything on steam that works on linux (well over 50% of the total catalog) so the necessary volume to break even is way lower.
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).
I mean, it's successful I guess, but also not exactly taking over the world.
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