Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming

Right this moment is the Zero.33 anniversary of Valve’s Steam Deck, the handheld gaming PC that every body nonetheless created the marketplace for handheld gaming PCs. It became as soon as a mess to inaugurate! But three years later, The Verge has knowledge showing how it has dominated the nascent market. Whereas Valve suggested us in November 2023 that it had sold “extra than one tens of millions” of the AMD-powered handheld, we’ve underneath no circumstances had a upright peep at how big it’s or how Dwelling windows competitors stack up… till now. It appears to be just like the Steam Deck, up to now, has been bigger than all its competitors blended.

Market study firm IDC makes expend of present chains to estimate loyal how many handheld gaming methods obtain shipped spherical the enviornment, and creates spending forecasts. When I requested IDC market study analyst Lewis Ward if he’d be willing to isolate SteamOS and Dwelling windows gaming handhelds from that knowledge, he talked about sure.

So here are the estimated blended shipments of the Steam Deck, and the Dwelling windows-essentially essentially based Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Trip, and MSI Claw from 2022 thru 2024, and an estimate for 2025:

Add it up, and that’s loyal beneath 6 million shipments in three years. One ability to look for that: it’s cramped and it’s no longer if truth be told rising. IDC’s forecasting beneath 2 million shipments in 2025, rather then any main expansion.

One more is that it’s merely early days for the class: Meta’s Ray-Bans only sold 2 million pairs between October 2023 and February 2025, nonetheless its maker is taking that as a imprint it could actually presumably perchance well rapidly promote 10 million every three hundred and sixty five days.

“I guess it’s amazing,” AMD gaming advertising boss Frank Azor tells me, discussing IDC’s numbers for handheld gaming PCs. “This didn’t exist three years within the past; we went from nothing, zero, to incremental class creation within the tens of millions of things.”

But out of those 6 million shipments, the lion’s portion were the Steam Deck itself, in accordance to IDC’s estimates. All of the 2022 shipments are the Steam Deck, and Ward tells me upwards of 50 percent of the 2023 shipments and forty eight percent of the 2024 shipments are the Deck as smartly. Doing the math, Valve has now shipped upwards of Three.7 million Steam Decks and has quite presumably crossed Four million by now.

(Mark: IDC’s numbers attain no longer at point out consist of Chinese language handhelds from companies love GPD, Ayaneo and OneXPlayer, even though it appears to be like imaginable they are cramped gamers in accordance to their public backer numbers on Indiegogo.)

With as few as 2 million Dwelling windows handhelds shipping in two years, it’s no longer a immense surprise that AMD and Intel aren’t spending big on extra custom chips love the one who’s quiet working perfectly smartly for the Steam Deck — in particular if the rumors are stunning that early Dwelling windows handheld consumers returned their purchases at surprisingly excessive charges. (Anecdotally, I’ve viewed a lot of inaugurate-field stock of the Asus ROG Ally when I’ve checked out Handiest Recall on-line and in-person.)

But I am hoping AMD will make investments in making that Steam Deck lightning strike another time. Because when every quite about a low-energy gaming chip is within the foundation aimed at laptops rather then handhelds, we procure disappointments love the novel Lenovo Legion Trip S, which couldn’t withstand the three-three hundred and sixty five days-outdated Steam Deck’s one-three hundred and sixty five days-outdated OLED revision in my evaluate, or the normal MSI Claw. Or, we procure vivid upright handhelds love the ROG Ally X that offset energy hungry chips with a bigass battery, nonetheless payment $800 or extra.

Not that chips are the only reason the Steam Deck has near this far, no longer by an extended shot! It’s the combo of Valve’s utilize-up-and-play SteamOS — which helps you to merely press a button to with out bid sleep and resume — and its Proton compatibility layer and precompiled shaders that, incredibly, in total originate Dwelling windows games bustle on Linux higher than they bustle on Dwelling windows. Then there’s its infinitely customizable and gratified controls that originate an extended time of older games playable.

It’s also the cost — assume console, no longer gaming laptop — and the draw in which incredibly easy Valve makes it to temporarily tweak efficiency in change for added battery existence, and the draw in which many additional things you would possibly perchance presumably perchance be ready to attain with a Steam Deck if you strive. (Narrative Games Store and Ubisoft and even Blizzard games are playable if you soar thru a couple hoops; it would with out bid circulation your PlayStation with the Chiaki app that you simply would possibly perchance procure within the Linux desktop app browser, letting the handheld double as a PlayStation Portal.)

No quite about a shipping handheld has near close, and whereas a mix of the Asus ROG Ally X and the SteamOS no longer-quite-a-fork Bazzite can if truth be told feel love the surely one of every worlds, you’ll pay twice the cost of an entry stage Steam Deck to procure it.

I mistakenly concept the largest handheld at CES 2025 became as soon as the Lenovo Legion Trip S, because Valve’s Steam Deck designers had given it their blessing to vary into the first licensed Zero.33-procure together SteamOS handheld, nonetheless I became as soon as inappropriate. Here’s how I carried out my Legion Trip S evaluate: “While you’re watching for a $499 Legion Trip S with SteamOS, here’s my advice: loyal purchase a $530 Steam Deck OLED as a replacement.”

Whereas it’s stunning that novel triple-A PC games now require extra energy than the Steam Deck can conveniently give you, Valve has continuously talked about that this is able to presumably perchance wait until it would present a “leap” in efficiency with out sacrificing battery existence before it introduces a Steam Deck 2, and that it acquired’t be utilizing this three hundred and sixty five days’s AMD Z2 chips.

Between that promise, the many amazing novel games that attain target Steam Deck, the excessive costs of novel Nvidia GPUs, and the root that novel Microsoft and Sony handhelds are seemingly about a years away, I don’t assume there are all that many causes to wait to purchase nowadays’s Steam Deck — unless the Nintendo Swap 2 by some ability supplants the Steam Deck because the handheld that game developers utilize to home with games.