this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
70 points (89.8% liked)

PC Gaming

11387 readers
1061 users here now

For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki

Rules:

  1. Be Respectful.
  2. No Spam or Porn.
  3. No Advertising.
  4. No Memes.
  5. No Tech Support.
  6. No questions about buying/building computers.
  7. No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
  8. No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
  9. No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
  10. Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
EXiLExJD@lemmy.ca
UncleBadTouch@lemmy.ca
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
70
What people miss about Steam Deck's "loss" to Nintendo (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago by atomicpoet@lemmy.world to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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 are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 4 points 4 days ago

Correct, it is also a sign that it is winning that it keeps attracting (and largely still beating) direct competitors. The Switch 2 can't have any realistic competitors because the ecosystem is so closed off and exclusive, it's a monopoly in its space.

Despite countless attempts by numerous companies to monopolize various parts of the PC experience, it continues to foster relentless competition, and rather than attempting to lock in their little bit of monopolization, Steam Deck is too busy breaking other, much more realistic attempts at complete monopolization of the PC ecosystem (Looking at you, Microsoft Windows). Even Steam's own game distribution dominance is a far cry from Microsoft's near-complete control of much of the desktop OS stack. It is a genuine pleasure to see Steam Deck and the hard work done by things like Proton (and to a lesser extent, improving support from hardware vendors most notably AMD) finally actually moving the needle on that.