Today is the third anniversary of Valveâs 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 âmultiple millionsâ of the AMD-powered handheld, weâve 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 heâd 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 thatâs just under 6 million shipments in three years. One way to view that: itâs …