LordOfChaos
Member
Today is the third anniversary of Valve’s Steam Deck, the handheld gaming PC that all but created the market for handheld gaming PCs. It was a mess to start! But three years later, The Verge has data showing how it has dominated the nascent market. While Valve told us in November 2023 that it had sold “multiple millions” of the AMD-powered handheld, we’ve never had a good glimpse at how big it is or how Windows competitors stack up… till now. It seems the Steam Deck, so far, has been bigger than all its competitors combined.
Market research firm IDC uses supply chains to estimate just how many handheld gaming systems have shipped around the world, and creates spending forecasts. When I asked IDC market research analyst Lewis Ward if he’d be willing to isolate SteamOS and Windows gaming handhelds from that data, he said yes.
So here are the estimated combined shipments of the Steam Deck, and the Windows-based Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw from 2022 through 2024, and an estimate for 2025:
Combined Valve Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw. Figures include all SKUs in associated hardware families.
Add it up, and that’s just under 6 million shipments in three years. One way to view that: it’s small and it’s not really growing. IDC’s forecasting under 2 million shipments in 2025, rather than any major expansion.
Another is that it’s simply early days for the category: Meta’s Ray-Bans only sold 2 million pairs between October 2023 and February 2025, but its maker is taking that as a sign it could soon sell 10 million each year.
“I think it’s amazing,” AMD gaming marketing boss Frank Azor tells me, discussing IDC’s numbers for handheld gaming PCs. “This didn’t exist three years ago; we went from nothing, zero, to incremental category creation in the millions of units.”
www.theverge.com
6 million total, still don't see it as too directly competing with the Switch 2 with the Switch 1 at 141+ million as some articles like to try to frame as a contest, but the SD has been the most successful of PC handhelds and now we know the numbers
Market research firm IDC uses supply chains to estimate just how many handheld gaming systems have shipped around the world, and creates spending forecasts. When I asked IDC market research analyst Lewis Ward if he’d be willing to isolate SteamOS and Windows gaming handhelds from that data, he said yes.
So here are the estimated combined shipments of the Steam Deck, and the Windows-based Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw from 2022 through 2024, and an estimate for 2025:
2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 (Estimate) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,620,000 | 2,867,000 | 1,485,000 | 1,926,000 |
Add it up, and that’s just under 6 million shipments in three years. One way to view that: it’s small and it’s not really growing. IDC’s forecasting under 2 million shipments in 2025, rather than any major expansion.
Another is that it’s simply early days for the category: Meta’s Ray-Bans only sold 2 million pairs between October 2023 and February 2025, but its maker is taking that as a sign it could soon sell 10 million each year.
“I think it’s amazing,” AMD gaming marketing boss Frank Azor tells me, discussing IDC’s numbers for handheld gaming PCs. “This didn’t exist three years ago; we went from nothing, zero, to incremental category creation in the millions of units.”
Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming
How big is the handheld PC gaming industry?
www.theverge.com
6 million total, still don't see it as too directly competing with the Switch 2 with the Switch 1 at 141+ million as some articles like to try to frame as a contest, but the SD has been the most successful of PC handhelds and now we know the numbers
I think PS Portal is selling at a faster pace!
