To put this in perspective:
Valve has revealed that Steam Deck players accumulated 330 million hours of gameplay during 2024, representing a remarkable 64% increase compared to the previous year.
That’s the equivalent of every Switch owner playing two hours in the entire year. Nintendo doesn’t share their usage numbers in aggregate, but they do provide a “year in review” thing per user and most of the ones I see online are in the three digit range. Even assuming a bunch of people aren’t using these at all, we’re looking one to two orders of magnitude larger than the Steam Deck, which checks out with what we know about the total numbers sold for each device.
Which is to say, the Deck is probably as popular as, say, a Sega Game Gear or a Sega Saturn but nowhere near any of the modern consoles yet.
Its the year of the
linux desktopsteam deck!You know what, I’ll take a Sega saturn equivalent. We’re at least still talking about the Saturn today.
Hey, I had a Sega Saturn. Loved my Sega Saturn. Like it more than my Steam Deck, if I’m being honest, but I do like my Deck and I do have one.
I’m just saying, when we’re talking numbers in the millions it’s easy to lose perspective.
Not to undercut it, but the steam deck shows triple the actual game time for some of my games, as it probably counted the time the device was asleep with a game running, due to some glitch.
This should fix itself once it reconnects to the internet.
My time went from >100h after closing it back to a sane number.
I don’t like how that article doesn’t have a source, but I found this article with a source from Valve.
I’m looking forward to the Legion Go S because at least that’s a lot more likely to be sold officially in my country than the Steam Deck will. Also I think that more choice for officially supported Steam OS devices is on a whole good for consumers.
Despite the expectations surrounding the Steam Deck 2,
What expectations? Valve has flat out said its not happening yet because the hardware isn’t there yet.
Have they said that recently? The only definitive comment I remember from them was something along the lines “definitely not in the next 2-3 years” around launch, which was 3 years ago.
Not saying that means I “expect” it’s happening, just curious if you know of anything more recent that says its not happening.
When AMD was talking about RDNA4 one or two months ago, there were rumors that it would be for the new Steam Deck, and Valve claimed that it wasn’t, and that it was still a long way out.
I never play my steamdeck hand held. But boy do I rip through my backlog with it hooked up to the TV.
Its one of the joys of the device, isn’t it? I know my friend uses hers as a permanently docked desktop device, basically a cheap way for her to get into desktop PC gaming. I use mine as a handheld device but I have a second one that I got my family to use as a gaming device in the living room. 3 totally different use cases supported delightfully by 1 device.
If this is tracked just by game playtime, then this is underselling it too. Sunshine/Moonlight alone would probably add a substantial amount of time to this count.
This can’t be true, because I’m not using steam anymore/s
