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Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Comparing 90’s handheld gaming to 2020’s handheld PC’s doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
I'm comparing unit sales. The Deck just happens to slot in between older handhelds in terms of unit sales. It also sold about as much as the Saturn and a little more than the Dreamcast, as far as I can tell. I may be ahead of both and on par with the Wii U now, but Steam isn't super transparent with giving sales numbers.
I get that but saying it’s sold less than the game gear implies a pretty serious failure lol I just don’t think they’re even in the same product lineup and the comparison doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I’ll admit I’m being a little nitpicky I’m not trying to start a fight with you here or something
No, I get it, no animosity here. I'm just curious about why you think the bar is fundamentally different for the Deck than for consoles in general.
Hell, adjusted for inflation the Game Gear retailed for the equivalent of 300 bucks at launch, which is not far off from the lowest price for the Deck at 399. Plus 90s devices sold a lot less than modern devices. Why would meeting the Game Gear not be a reasonable target for the Deck?
It's the most successful individual PC handheld, but it's also not made it into the same range as most consoles so it hasn't turned this product category into a mainstream device... yet.
I think where I struggle to compare them is that the game gear was meant to be a mass market device that would sell tens of millions of units if not upwards of a hundred million. Handheld PCs have a narrower audience and tend to skew more tech savvy, especially in the case of the Steam Deck. They have much lower expectations for units sold because they’re not trying to do the “sell a bazillion units -> sell a hundred bazillion games for our system” game. In valve’s case they’re clearly creating a steam-dominated ecosystem that expands well beyond their handhelds.
Hah. You're overestimating the potential of 90s gaming devices. No game console, handheld or not, had sold a hundred million units. Hell, the Game Boy didn't crack into the hundreds until the Game Boy Color came around, and it was certainly the first.
Anyway, mild exaggeration aside, I get what you're aiming for, but I guess my question is why people read that positioning on Valve devices in the first place. There's no obvious indication that Valve is any less ambitious than any other first party, or any reason why they would be. They went to AMD and comissioned a custom APU at scale, just like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft are doing. The only differentiating factor is they built the thing on top of a mostly usable pre-existing OS (which I suppose Microsoft also does, but hey). If anything their entire call to fame was to "consolize" Linux for SteamOS, which they'd been trying to do for a while anyway.
I agree that their goal is to set up an ecosystem that works for them, but I find it surprising that people assume they're disinterested in hardware sales. If I had to guess I'd say it's because they refuse to market too hard outside their own ecosystem, so their branding feels different than the more in-your-face releases of Sony, MS or Nintendo products and people assume that's because they're intrinsically or intentionally smaller, which I don't think is true. I do think that image is projected on purpose, though.
Nintendo has done backwards compatibility before, pretty extensively. The Switch 2 isn't a departure. They put a GBA cartridge slot in the first few Nintendo DSs (they lost it in the DSi), and the 3DS was backwards compatible with the DS. They also did GC to Wii and Wii to Wii U (but not GC to WiiU). They even put physical plugs for GC controllers and memory cards on the Wii.
And they've done weirder stuff, like the ability to use a GBA as a controller on the GameCube and some cross-save bonuses between games in some platforms.
The Game Gear is a weird example for that, specifically, since it was basically a repackaged Master System, so there was a lot of game crossover. Sega also had a widely advertised adapter that allowed the Mega Drive to play Master System games.
Anyway, nerdy retro gaming stuff aside, there is definitely a gradient across Valve, that is mostly driving a software platform across a ton of third party hardware, the 4K twins, which are relatively focused on service providing and Nintendo, which is somewhat more focused on a single platform, at least so far. It's very much not black and white and very much not a new thing, though.
And in any case, the smooth gradient does mean that ultimately it should be fair to at least compare Deck sales to console sales.