It’s silly to compare Switch 2 sales to Steam Deck sales.

The Switch 2 is a locked-down, vertically integrated platform. There are no ROG Switch 2s. No Lenovo Switch 2s. No Switch laptops or tower PCs with discrete GPUs. If you want to play Mario Kart World, your only option is to buy a Switch 2. Period.

Steam Deck, by contrast, isn’t a platform. It’s just one hardware option—one entry point into the sprawling, open ecosystem known as PC gaming.

Every year, around 245 million PCs are shipped globally. If even 20–25% of those are gaming-focused, that’s 49–61 million gaming PCs annually. Steam Deck is a sliver of that. So of course it won’t outsell a console that’s the only gateway to a major IP.

But that’s exactly the point.

PC gaming is too decentralized for any single device to dominate. The last “PC” that did was the Commodore 64, which sold 12.5–17 million units over 12 years because it was a self-contained platform, unlike modern Windows, Mac, or Linux machines.

That the Steam Deck has sold 4 million units despite competing with every other gaming PC in existence is remarkable. It didn’t just sell—it legitimized a category. Handheld PC gaming is now a thing. That’s why Lenovo, ASUS, and MSI have followed. Even Microsoft is getting in, optimizing Windows for handhelds—something they would never have done if the Steam Deck didn’t hold their feet to the fire.

So no, Steam Deck didn’t outsell the Switch 2. It didn’t need to.

It won by changing the landscape.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    20 hours ago

    If the Switch didn’t exist then I don’t think we would’ve gotten the Steam Deck.

    or we would have earlier and more of it? I’m not sure how are you basing your hipothesis is but to assume that handheld market with this crazy demand would just be there unfulfilled is kinda silly. Switch didn’t event some magic technology that was not available before - it just took the market.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      16 hours ago

      You’re contradicting yourself. If you believe the Steam Deck exists purely independently from the Switch and that we would’ve had the Steam Deck before the Switch if the Switch never existed, but we didn’t, it came after.

      And no, I don’t think it invented some sort of magic technology, obviously I don’t think that. I’m saying the Steam Deck was good competition for the Switch in the portable/docked market (whatever we wanna call those).