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.
If you want to play it, then you can buy any console. This creates competition, hopefully decreasing or at least maintaining prices for consumers.
For example, games like Jedi Survivor. Very popular. Not an exclusive. You can play it on Xbox, Playstation, PC, whatever. If all games weren’t exclusives and could be played on anything, then the only reason to buy or not buy a console would be the console performance and company behavior. This would definitely increase game sales and availability as well.
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The Gyroscope and touchpad of the PS5 controller have actually been really useful for setting up games designed for M+K on the TV via my Steam Deck. Kind of funny, since those features go completely unused by me on the console it was designed for.
I’m almost entirely an Xbox user, I do have a decent amount on pc and switch. Thanks for your perspective.