Sean Hollister writing for The Verge: Three Years Later, the Steam Deck Has Dominated Handheld PC Gaming Shipments

Add it up, and that’s just under 6 million shipments in three years. One way to view that: it’s small and it’s not really growing. IDC’s forecasting under 2 million shipments in 2025, rather than any major expansion.

It’s not a huge number of handheld PCs, and it’s a bummer not to see the yearly numbers hockey sticking up and to the right, but I’ll just say for myself that I hope this category continues to find an audience so that companies like Valve keep making the products that I love so much. I’ve got two things to add, though.

One, the article reports notably higher return rates for the non-Steam Deck handhelds, and I totally get that. Those products run Windows and you need to treat them like Windows in too many ways, even if the manufacturer tries to put their game launcher on top of it as much as possible. I can’t stress enough how the Steam Deck feels like a console in the way a Nintendo Switch does. You can step outside the guard walls and install more games or even boot into a Linux environment, but you have to go out of your way to do these things, and the experience really feels like a console that anyone could use. This is a classic example of Valve winning with consumers by focusing on user experience over raw power.

Two, this situation relates back to what I wrote last week about how you need to be able to separate your feelings about a product with your projections for how well it will do in the mainstream market. I’ll be honest and say these sales numbers are lower than I hoped for. 6 million handheld PC gaming consoles isn’t nothing, but that means that in 3 years these have sold about as much as the Nintendo Switch sells every 6 months this late into its lifecycle (approximately, based on the latest quarterly data). I truly adore my Steam Deck, but I can’t look at these numbers and think that it’s still a pretty niche market that hasn’t convinced most people that it’s worth buying into. I think the general sentiment from Steam Deck owners is quite positive on the whole, so I do think there’s something there that could take off in a big way, but I’m not about to proclaim that everyone is going to sell their Nintendo and Sony consoles and do all their gaming on a Steam Deck anytime soon.