We are still talking about Steam Deck, and it is that the Valve console continues to give news, at least curious, although they are not always official. This is a good example, that of the sales of the device, a fact that the company has kept silent about until now, although the few movements that have been made around its product have not generated doubts that, at least, things are not bad.
Thus, when at the end of last year we reported that Steam Deck would have already exceeded one million units sold, neither the source was official, although it was reliable to a certain extent, nor could the tone be other than conditional. Now the same thing is happening, but with a different source: that of the analytics firm Omdia, whose forecasts based on the information they handle is the one advanced in the headline.
That according to the observed sales trend, Steam Deck will end this year doubling the sales of the previous one, or what is the same, placing three million units on the market. A figure that in another context would be totally disastrous, but in which Valve moves, it is not so bad. Steam Deck is, as we recently argued, a moderate success, but a success nonetheless.
To put it in context, of the three majors Of electronic entertainment, the one that sells the least is Xbox, which would have placed between eight and six million Xbox Series units a year, according to data from 2021 and 2022 (in the same period, PS5 sales would be around 12 and 10 million and those of Nintendo Switch the 24 and 15 million, of course this plays in another league). These data are equally approximate.
In any case, it should be noted that, for Valve, the Steam Deck is little more than a side project, a product with which to explore a market that essentially dominates comfortably, since its main business continues to be selling games -and collecting commission for each sale- through Steam, the most popular PC game store on the Internet. And Steam Deck is still an adapted PC.
In summary, if Steam Deck managed to sell its first million units shortly before its first year of life, the pace of sales would be accelerating, or should almost double, according to the information published by Omdia. In addition, almost all sales would come from the digital channel, which also has its merit. As is the tactic that Valve is using to provide the console with a large and quality catalog.
Without going any further, we recently picked up the news that 75% of the hundred most popular Steam games are compatible with Steam Deck and, more recently, the 20 most played games on Steam Deck, a list in which no the big releases of the season are missing, of Hogwarts Legacy to Elden Ring, resident evil 4 or Octopath Traveler II. Said like that, it may not seem like a big deal, but let’s remember that Steam Deck works with Linux.
