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

Immediately is the third anniversary of Valve’s Steam Deck, the hand-held gaming PC that each one however created the marketplace for handheld gaming PCs. It was a large number to start out! However three years later, The Verge has information displaying the way it has dominated the nascent market. Whereas Valve informed us in November 2023 that it had offered “a number of thousands and thousands” of the AMD-powered handheld, we’ve by no means had an excellent glimpse at how large it’s or how Home windows rivals stack up… until now. It appears the Steam Deck, thus far, has been larger than all its rivals mixed.

Market analysis agency IDC makes use of provide chains to estimate simply what number of handheld gaming techniques have shipped world wide, and creates spending forecasts. Once I requested IDC market analysis analyst Lewis Ward if he’d be prepared to isolate SteamOS and Home windows gaming handhelds from that information, he stated sure.

So listed below are the estimated mixed shipments of the Steam Deck, and the Home windows-based Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw from 2022 by 2024, and an estimate for 2025:

Add it up, and that’s slightly below 6 million shipments in three years. One strategy to view that: it’s small and it’s not likely rising. IDC’s forecasting beneath 2 million shipments in 2025, moderately than any main enlargement.

One other is that it’s merely early days for the class: Meta’s Ray-Bans solely offered 2 million pairs between October 2023 and February 2025, however its maker is taking that as an indication it may quickly promote 10 million every 12 months.

“I believe it’s wonderful,” AMD gaming advertising and marketing boss Frank Azor tells me, discussing IDC’s numbers for handheld gaming PCs. “This didn’t exist three years in the past; we went from nothing, zero, to incremental class creation within the thousands and thousands of models.”

However out of these 6 million shipments, the lion’s share have been the Steam Deck itself, based on IDC’s estimates. The entire 2022 shipments are the Steam Deck, and Ward tells me upwards of fifty p.c of the 2023 shipments and 48 p.c of the 2024 shipments are the Deck as nicely. Doing the mathematics, Valve has now shipped upwards of three.7 million Steam Decks and has fairly probably crossed 4 million by now.

(Word: IDC’s numbers don’t presently embody Chinese language handhelds from firms like GPD, Ayaneo and OneXPlayer, although it appears attainable they’re small gamers based mostly on their public backer numbers on Indiegogo.)

With as few as 2 million Home windows handhelds transport in two years, it’s not a enormous shock that AMD and Intel aren’t spending large on extra customized chips just like the one which’s nonetheless working completely nicely for the Steam Deck — notably if the rumors are true that early Home windows handheld consumers returned their purchases at unusually excessive charges. (Anecdotally, I’ve seen numerous open-box inventory of the Asus ROG Ally after I’ve checked out Greatest Purchase on-line and in-person.)

However I hope AMD will spend money on making that Steam Deck lightning strike once more. As a result of when each different low-power gaming chip is initially aimed toward laptops moderately than handhelds, we get disappointments like the brand new Lenovo Legion Go S, which couldn’t stand as much as the three-year-old Steam Deck’s one-year-old OLED revision in my evaluation, or the unique MSI Claw. Or, we get fairly good handhelds just like the ROG Ally X that offset energy hungry chips with a bigass battery, however value $800 or extra.

Not that chips are the solely motive the Steam Deck has come this far, not by a protracted shot! It’s the mixture of Valve’s pick-up-and-play SteamOS — which helps you to merely press a button to simply sleep and resume — and its Proton compatibility layer and precompiled shaders that, extremely, usually make Home windows video games run on Linux higher than they run on Home windows. Then there’s its infinitely customizable and comfy controls that make a long time of older video games playable.

It’s additionally the worth — suppose console, not gaming laptop computer — and the way extremely straightforward Valve makes it to briefly tweak efficiency in change for extra battery life, and what number of further issues you are able to do with a Steam Deck when you strive. (Epic Video games Retailer and Ubisoft and even Blizzard video games are playable when you leap by a pair hoops; it might probably simply stream your PlayStation with the Chiaki app you’ll find within the Linux desktop app browser, letting the hand-held double as a PlayStation Portal.)

No different transport handheld has come shut, and whereas a mixture of the Asus ROG Ally X and the SteamOS not-quite-a-fork Bazzite can really feel like the most effective of each worlds, you’ll pay twice the worth of an entry stage Steam Deck to get it.

I mistakenly thought crucial handheld at CES 2025 was the Lenovo Legion Go S, as a result of Valve’s Steam Deck designers had given it their blessing to change into the primary approved third-party SteamOS handheld, however I used to be incorrect. Right here’s how I ended my Legion Go S evaluation: “For those who’re ready for a $499 Legion Go S with SteamOS, right here’s my recommendation: simply purchase a $530 Steam Deck OLED as a substitute.”

Whereas it’s true that new triple-A PC video games now require extra energy than the Steam Deck can comfortably offer you, Valve has persistently stated that it’s going to wait till it might probably present a “leap” in efficiency with out sacrificing battery life earlier than it introduces a Steam Deck 2, and that it received’t be utilizing this 12 months’s AMD Z2 chips.

Between that promise, the various wonderful new video games that do goal Steam Deck, the excessive costs of latest Nvidia GPUs, and the concept new Microsoft and Sony handhelds are seemingly a number of years away, I don’t suppose there are all that many causes to attend to purchase right now’s Steam Deck — until the Nintendo Swap 2 someway supplants the Steam Deck as the hand-held that recreation builders want to focus on with video games.