this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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What people miss about Steam Deck's "loss" to Nintendo (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago by atomicpoet@lemmy.world to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It’s silly to compare Switch 2 sales to Steam Deck sales.

The Switch 2 is a locked-down, vertically integrated platform. There are no ROG Switch 2s. No Lenovo Switch 2s. No Switch laptops or tower PCs with discrete GPUs. If you want to play Mario Kart World, your only option is to buy a Switch 2. Period.

Steam Deck, by contrast, isn’t a platform. It’s just one hardware option—one entry point into the sprawling, open ecosystem known as PC gaming.

Every year, around 245 million PCs are shipped globally. If even 20–25% of those are gaming-focused, that’s 49–61 million gaming PCs annually. Steam Deck is a sliver of that. So of course it won’t outsell a console that’s the only gateway to a major IP.

But that’s exactly the point.

PC gaming is too decentralized for any single device to dominate. The last “PC” that did was the Commodore 64, which sold 12.5–17 million units over 12 years because it was a self-contained platform, unlike modern Windows, Mac, or Linux machines.

That the Steam Deck has sold 4 million units despite competing with every other gaming PC in existence is remarkable. It didn’t just sell—it legitimized a category. Handheld PC gaming is now a thing. That’s why Lenovo, ASUS, and MSI have followed. Even Microsoft is getting in, optimizing Windows for handhelds—something they would never have done if the Steam Deck didn't hold their feet to the fire.

So no, Steam Deck didn’t outsell the Switch 2. It didn’t need to.

It won by changing the landscape.

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[–] archonet@lemy.lol 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

more than that, all the other PC handhelds that've come out so far just sort of... miss the mark, in some way. Either hamstrung by windows, or being too big and heavy, or having terrible battery life by comparison, or because of the lack of touchpads. Whatever your personal gripe with the other offerings, the Deck stuck the landing and mastered the balancing act of "powerful enough, with a long enough runtime, but not too big or heavy". It not only created a new market segment, but it is the standard for that segment that every competitor must be measured against, and so far all of them have one or two missteps.

[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 days ago

The software optimization that Valve invests into the steam deck is also part of what makes the handheld so good!