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

At the moment time is the 1/three anniversary of Valve’s Steam Deck, the handheld gaming PC that every body nonetheless created the marketplace for handheld gaming PCs. It turned into a huge quantity to originate! But three years later, The Verge has recordsdata exhibiting how it has dominated the nascent market. Whereas Valve educated us in November 2023 that it had equipped “more than one 1000’s and 1000’s” of the AMD-powered handheld, we’ve never had an accurate examine at how huge it is or how Residence windows opponents stack up… till now. It seems the Steam Deck, to this level, has been better than all its opponents blended.

Market analysis agency IDC makes spend of offer chains to estimate actual how many handheld gaming programs contain shipped right thru the world, and creates spending forecasts. After I asked IDC market analysis analyst Lewis Ward if he’d be intriguing to isolate SteamOS and Residence windows gaming handhelds from that recordsdata, he stated sure.

So listed below are the estimated blended shipments of the Steam Deck, and the Residence windows-based fully mostly Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Scramble, and MSI Claw from 2022 thru 2024, and an estimate for 2025:

Add it up, and that’s actual under 6 million shipments in three years. One technique to examine that: it’s miniature and it’s no longer surely rising. IDC’s forecasting under 2 million shipments in 2025, fairly than any fundamental expansion.

Any other is that it’s merely early days for the category: Meta’s Ray-Bans only equipped 2 million pairs between October 2023 and February 2025, nonetheless its maker is taking that as a signal it would possibly well soon promote 10 million every year.

“I contemplate it’s unbelievable,” AMD gaming marketing and marketing boss Frank Azor tells me, discussing IDC’s numbers for handheld gaming PCs. “This didn’t exist three years previously; we went from nothing, zero, to incremental category creation in the 1000’s and 1000’s of devices.”

But out of these 6 million shipments, the lion’s fraction were the Steam Deck itself, in keeping with IDC’s estimates. All of the 2022 shipments are the Steam Deck, and Ward tells me upwards of 50 p.c of the 2023 shipments and forty eight p.c of the 2024 shipments are the Deck as successfully. Doing the math, Valve has now shipped upwards of three.7 million Steam Decks and has fairly possibly crossed four million by now.

(Uncover: IDC’s numbers end no longer currently consist of Chinese language handhelds from companies love GPD, Ayaneo and OneXPlayer, though it seems that you just’ll doubtless be ready to imagine they’re miniature gamers in step with their public backer numbers on Indiegogo.)

With as few as 2 million Residence windows handhelds transport in two years, it’s no longer a immense surprise that AMD and Intel aren’t spending huge on more custom chips love the person that’s easy working completely successfully for the Steam Deck — severely if the rumors are actual that early Residence windows handheld investors returned their purchases at unusually high rates. (Anecdotally, I’ve viewed a entire bunch originate-box stock of the Asus ROG Ally after I’ve regarded at Perfect Raise on-line and in-person.)

But I’m hoping AMD will invest in making that Steam Deck lightning strike all over again. Because of when every varied low-vitality gaming chip is before the entirety set apart geared in direction of laptops fairly than handhelds, we receive disappointments love the fresh Lenovo Legion Scramble S, which couldn’t stand as a lot as the three-year-outmoded Steam Deck’s one-year-outmoded OLED revision in my review, or the authentic MSI Claw. Or, we receive fairly actual handhelds love the ROG Ally X that offset vitality hungry chips with a bigass battery, nonetheless fee $800 or more.

No longer that chips are the only reason the Steam Deck has approach this a long way, no longer by an extended shot! It’s the aggregate of Valve’s hold-up-and-play SteamOS — which enables you to merely press a button to with out complications sleep and resume — and its Proton compatibility layer and precompiled shaders that, extremely, fundamentally make Residence windows video games bustle on Linux higher than they bustle on Residence windows. Then there’s its infinitely customizable and delighted controls that make many years of older video games playable.

It’s also the fee — contemplate console, no longer gaming pc pc — and how extremely easy Valve makes it to snappy tweak performance in alternate for more battery lifestyles, and how many further things you’ll doubtless be ready to end with a Steam Deck whenever you try. (Fable Video games Store and Ubisoft and even Blizzard video games are playable whenever you leap thru a pair hoops; it goes to with out complications circulation your PlayStation with the Chiaki app you’ll doubtless be ready to secure in the Linux desktop app browser, letting the handheld double as a PlayStation Portal.)

No varied transport handheld has approach stop, and whereas a aggregate of the Asus ROG Ally X and the SteamOS no longer-fairly-a-fork Bazzite can surely feel love the most effective of each worlds, you’ll pay twice the fee of an entry level Steam Deck to receive it.

I mistakenly device the last discover handheld at CES 2025 turned into the Lenovo Legion Scramble S, because Valve’s Steam Deck designers had given it their blessing to was the first approved 1/three-birthday celebration SteamOS handheld, nonetheless I turned into notorious. Here’s how I accomplished my Legion Scramble S review: “Within the event you’re looking forward to a $499 Legion Scramble S with SteamOS, right here’s my advice: actual put a $530 Steam Deck OLED as one more.”

Whereas it’s actual that fresh triple-A PC video games now require more vitality than the Steam Deck can with ease present you with, Valve has continuously stated that this is in a position to well wait till it goes to present a “leap” in performance with out sacrificing battery lifestyles earlier than it introduces a Steam Deck 2, and that it obtained’t be the usage of this year’s AMD Z2 chips.

Between that promise, the varied unbelievable fresh video games that end target Steam Deck, the high costs of most modern Nvidia GPUs, and the premise that fresh Microsoft and Sony handhelds are doubtless a few years away, I don’t contemplate there are all that many reasons to wait to get rid of this day’s Steam Deck — unless the Nintendo Swap 2 come what would possibly supplants the Steam Deck because the handheld that game builders hold to kind out with video games.