This article includes sales estimates for different handhelds from market research firm IDC.
They place total handheld PC sales of the Steam Deck, RoG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw at almost 6 million units for the past 3 years. It’s estimated that the Steam Deck makes up between 3.7 to 4 million of those sales, more than all the other major handheld PC manufacturers combined.
I still think Valve need to release the SD2 soon before these manufacturers eat their dinner. I know steam will still make money when these manufacturers succeed, but still, a SD2 is a must.
Their big thing is that the new steam deck 2 has to be a significant performance increase over the existing steam deck, and that’s not really an option yet
Their approach leaves me with conflicting feelings.
On one hand, I dislike how the Steam Deck is among the weaker offerings for performance. On the other hand, I appreciate that it’s not a commodified device like phones, which keep increasing in price with only miniscule incremental improvements year over year.
It wouldn’t be as conflicting if they had better competitors following the yearly-improvement business model, as that would give more of a choice for those who prefer buying a new device each year. But, at least right now, the competing devices are pretty shit. None of them have dual track pads and 4 back buttons in addition to the standard inputs, and they’re all running Windows 11 with a bloatware bandage to cover up the fact that the OS is far from controller-friendly.
Honestly the Steam Deck could never become more powerful and I would be perfectly fine with it. Hardware reliability, ecosystem maturity and quality of life features are what actually matters. The deck already can run several lifetimes of indy games and that is just going to grow.
Chasing performance to improve Steam Deck sales I think is a subpar play, though that being said more powerful hardware is always welcome.
In my opinion the pc gaming market (excluding indies) has an irrational obsession on focusing only on making performance heavy games with extremely taxing system requirements, the Steam Deck blowing up in popularity with its subpar hardware is honestly one of the best things that could happen to the pc gaming industry.
I think as long as PC handheld are winning Valve is more interested in have them ship steam or even better - steamos.
The upgrades from other devices felt very marginal tho it feels like we’re close to where new steamdeck would make sense power wise.
I mean it makes total sense since I’m almost positive that Valve is probably not making any profits from the decks they sell, and their money is from Steam. So, having it on more “mainstream” devices is better for them. Steam deck OLED is actually more powerful than the legion go S from what I’ve seen online so far
Having arch based os become mainstream would be huge for linuc gaming. Steamdeck already is and it just showing how much better linux is for gaming when approached with proper resources.
I was just reading the Verge’s review of legion go s and Bazzite was giving like 10-40% performance improvement over windows - that’s just crazy.