Steam Deck makes up round half of PC handheld market share, analysis exhibits

There are an enormous variety of PC handheld gaming gadgets in the marketplace now. From recognizable manufacturers like MSI, ASUS ROG, and Lenovo to smaller firms like Ayaneo and Ayn, virtually everybody appears to have a handheld in the marketplace. Regardless of this, the Steam Deck stays king of all of them.

It has been three years since Valve launched the Steam Deck and triggered a change within the handheld PC gaming house. The success of the Steam Deck was rapidly adopted by rivals trying to get a slice of the pie, ensuing within the launch of the ASUS ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, the Ayaneo Flip, and plenty of others.

Steam Deck gross sales are properly forward of the competitors

Regardless of makes an attempt by numerous manufacturers to muscle in, information gathered by The Verge exhibits that the Steam Deck stays king of the hand held gaming market. The Verge labored with market analysis firm IDC to trace numerous provide chains all over the world to get a whole image of how properly every handheld is performing in gross sales.

Slightly below six million handheld gaming gadgets have shipped in three years (2022-2024). Although this does not initially look like a big quantity, it’s price remembering that the PC handheld market is a comparatively new section, and people six million gadgets are largely going to early adopters.

“The entire 2022 shipments are the Steam Deck, and Ward tells me upwards of fifty % of the 2023 shipments and 48 % of the 2024 shipments are the Deck as properly. Doing the maths, Valve has now shipped upwards of three.7 million Steam Decks and has fairly presumably crossed 4 million by now.”

The Verge

The figures present that the overwhelming majority of these six million shipments have been for the Steam Deck itself. Over 3.7 million Steam Decks have been shipped over the previous few years with as few as two million of its Home windows-based rival gadgets shipped.

AMD gaming advertising and marketing boss Frank Azor was enthusiastic when he spoke to The Verge, saying: “I feel it is superb. This did not exist three years in the past; we went from nothing, zero, to incremental class creation within the tens of millions of models.” In fact, AMD is doing extraordinarily properly out of the hand held market, because it supplies the bulk of the APUs that energy them.

So if the inner {hardware} is usually the identical, what does Steam Deck have that different gadgets don’t? The reply might be quite simple – Home windows.

Home windows is at finest a bit clunky on handheld gadgets, at worst it actively harms the taking part in expertise. The issue is such that mod groups are engaged on methods to make Home windows extra practical on gadgets such because the Asus ROG Ally and MSI Claw, and even offering SteamOS-based options equivalent to Bazzite and SteamFork.

Until different producers could make the person expertise as frictionless as SteamOS, it appears Valve is prone to proceed profitable the hand held battle. On that be aware, ASUS has already confirmed its intention to stay to Home windows, however SteamOS is lastly coming to third-party gadgets equivalent to a particular variant on the Legion Go S coming this Could.