cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31220768
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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
That seems like a too-charitable estimate. I would guess that 95%+ computers built and sold are for business uses. Of the remaining 12M, I would further guess that 90%+ of those aren’t for gaming, but for Grandma and Pop to use “The Facebook,” and for Mom or Uncle to file their taxes and buy airline tickets. By my guesstimate, that could be around 1M gaming computers sold.
As an example, the place I used to work from ’16 to '21 bought about 700 computers yearly. One big year had us replacing about 3k desktops and about 300 laptops (changed from Dell to HP). My family (about forty of us from Grandma to my son) bought four in the past four years. Of those four, one was for gaming. My last gaming rig purchase was in March, and replaced an Intel 8xxx from 2015, which was itself just a mobo/CPU/RAM upgrade
It seems to me that almost all computers sold are for business, and only a tiny sliver are sold for gaming.
I don’t have anything else determinative to add about it. I just wanted to opine about the question of percentages.
Tom’s Hardware suggests that around 260 million PCs were sold in 2023, and 44 million of those were gaming PCs. That comes out to around 17%, which is smaller than 25%, but within spitting distance of 20% - and much larger than 5%. Definitely not a sliver.
