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.
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.
I am not sure why you compare PS5 sales to Steam Deck, Playstation is a brand that has been around from the 90s, has been advertised left and right, and so is known in every angle of the world, and are not even the same format/segment, I'd compare Steam Deck sales to ASUS Rog Ally if anything, since they've been around for pretty much the same and have been advertised as much?
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.
The Steam Deck is effectively a portable PS4/Xbox One, and it has blown me away in how great the user experience is. I played through more games on my Steam Deck this year than on my powerful gaming PC.
The steam deck is a way different value proposition compared to consoles though, console manufacturers take a loss for initial consoles sold until they can bring costs.
Whereas the steam deck has likely been sold as a profit from day one.
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.
Steam Deck really is an interesting comparison. It must be frustrating that Valve releases Steam Deck to fanatical reception if you feel like PS Vita was a better product for it's time. Even though PS Vita may have been a great product, it's possibly one that simply was not at the right place or time. I really think that Sony needed to win, not just sell modestly.
A big and weird part of this is simply because Valve is different. Still a corporation, still flawed, but certainly, if nothing else, definitely different. They have an appeal almost reminiscent of how people once regarded Google a long time ago. They've gotten a solid reputation for playing the long game with respect to building their ecosystem, and in that regard, Deck feels like a product many years in the making: the Steam client and games library, Proton and DXVK, the overlay and other middleware libraries, the multiple iterations of SteamOS, and many more endeavors all came into the product that the Deck is today.
Meanwhile, PS Vita did not have the luxury of the depth of consumer goodwill that Valve has, even if Sony has many times the breadth of consumer goodwill; worse, it needed to bootstrap it's ecosystem, whereas Valve has committed to bringing it's entire existing ecosystem to Deck instead. Valve also had the luxury of not being a traditional video game console vendor, and thus I don't think it elicited as strong of a reaction in the "console wars" either: I do not think that people view it the same. And hell, I don't think Valve does either. It has an aggressive starting price, and thus definitely can compete, but it seems probably still profitable. At the higher end, it's priced more like a gaming laptop, and thus the enthusiast gear that you would expect. I think they landed themselves a nearly unloseable situation with Deck. Because it's basically just an extension of their existing Steam ecosystem, it's essentially a value-add at worst. I would bet it acts more complimentary to other consoles, and there are probably few Deck owners without at least one other game console.
As a competitor to Nintendo's gaming handhelds and as a successor to the PSP, it seems like consumers largely rejected the PS Vita. Maybe in an alternate universe where Sony took an entirely different approach to the ecosystem and marketing of the PS Vita, things could've gone very differently.
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?
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).
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.
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.
Steam Deck comfortably runs high end AAA games like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn and Cyberpunk 2077, in many ways with comparable performance of the base Xbox model.
Which makes sense since the hardware is similar.
So I have no idea what you're talking about, it can easily replace Xbox.
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