Steam Deck & PC Gaming
PC gaming is still a bigger business than consoles, according to <https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/way-more-game-makers-are-working-on-pc-titles-than-ever-survey-says/>. And the Linux-powered Steam Deck has been pioneering the new handheld segment of the PC gaming market. But figures on Steam Deck sales are hard to come by. Here <https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/steam-deck-everything-you-were-afraid> is an attempt to tease out, from the available hints, how popular the product actually is. That article is over a year old by now, but it estimates that there were 3-4 million Steam Decks sold by that point. I think we can safely say another million or more in units has been added to that since then. One concrete figure from the Steam Hardware Survey <https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam> is that about 2.3% of all Steam users are on Linux. This looks like 0.7% specifically on the Steam Deck, so other Linux would be about 1.6%. Another linked survey reports that over half of Steam Deck users run other game emulation systems (e.g. PlayStation 2, Game Boy, GameCube) on their Decks.
On Sat, 25 Jan 2025 12:51:40 +1300, I wrote:
... the Linux-powered Steam Deck has been pioneering the new handheld segment of the PC gaming market.
But figures on Steam Deck sales are hard to come by.
Here <https://www.theverge.com/pc-gaming/618709/steam-deck-3-year-anniversary-handheld-gaming-shipments-idc> is an update with some more hints as to how the market is doing. While handheld PC gaming is is not (yet) a big growth market, it does seem to be a steady one. And while the Windows rivals have been making inroads, it still looks like the Steam Deck dominates, taking half the market, if not more. The modest sales are probably why Intel and AMD are not investing more on custom chips for this market. Quote: Not that chips are the only reason the Steam Deck has come this far, not by a long shot! It’s the combination of Valve’s pick-up-and-play SteamOS — which lets you simply press a button to easily sleep and resume — and its Proton compatibility layer and precompiled shaders that, incredibly, often make Windows games run on Linux better than they run on Windows. Then there’s its infinitely customizable and comfortable controls that make decades of older games playable. Both Microsoft and Sony have been teasing the prospect of introducing their own handheld gaming products, but indications are that these will remain vapourware for a few more years. And a delay that long seems like a recipe for irrelevance.
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro