Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming shipments

Today is the third anniversary of Valve’s 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, noti.group has data showing how it has dominated the nascent market. While Valve told us in November 2023 that it had sold “multiple millions” of the AMD-powered handheld, we’ve 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 he’d 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:

Add it up, and that’s just under 6 million shipments in three years. One way to view that: it’s small and it’s not really growing. IDC’s forecasting under 2 million shipments in 2025, rather than any major expansion.

Another is that it’s simply early days for the category: Meta’s Ray-Bans only sold 2 million pairs between October 2023 and February 2025, but its maker is taking that as a sign it could soon sell 10 million each year.

“I think it’s amazing,” AMD gaming marketing boss Frank Azor tells me, discussing IDC’s numbers for handheld gaming PCs. “This didn’t exist three years ago; we went from nothing, zero, to incremental category creation in the millions of units.”

But out of those 6 million shipments, the lion’s share have been the Steam Deck itself, according to IDC’s estimates. All of the 2022 shipments are the Steam Deck, and Ward tells me upwards of 50 percent of the 2023 shipments and 48 percent of the 2024 shipments are the Deck as well. Doing the math, Valve has now shipped upwards of 3.7 million Steam Decks and has quite possibly crossed 4 million by now.

(Note: IDC’s numbers do not currently include Chinese handhelds from companies like GPD, Ayaneo and OneXPlayer, though it seems possible they are small players based on their public backer numbers on Indiegogo.)

With as few as 2 million Windows handhelds shipping in two years, it’s not a huge surprise that AMD and Intel aren’t spending big on more custom chips like the one that’s still working perfectly well for the Steam Deck — particularly if the rumors are true that early Windows handheld buyers returned their purchases at unusually high rates. (Anecdotally, I’ve seen lots of open-box stock of the Asus ROG Ally when I’ve looked at Best Buy online and in-person.)

But I hope AMD will invest in making that Steam Deck lightning strike again. Because when every other low-power gaming chip is originally aimed at laptops rather than handhelds, we get disappointments like the new Lenovo Legion Go S, which couldn’t stand up to the three-year-old Steam Deck’s one-year-old OLED revision in my review, or the original MSI Claw. Or, we get pretty good handhelds like the ROG Ally X that offset power hungry chips with a bigass battery, but cost $800 or more.

Not that chips are the only reason the Steam Deck has come this far, not by a long shot! It’s the combination of Valve’s pick-up-and-play SteamOS — which lets you simply press a button to easily sleep and resume — and its Proton compatibility layer and precompiled shaders that, incredibly, often make Windows games run on Linux better than they run on Windows. Then there’s its infinitely customizable and comfortable controls that make decades of older games playable.

It’s also the price — think console, not gaming laptop — and how incredibly easy Valve makes it to temporarily tweak performance in exchange for more battery life, and how many additional things you can do with a Steam Deck if you try. (Epic Games Store and Ubisoft and even Blizzard games are playable if you jump through a couple hoops; it can easily stream your PlayStation with the Chiaki app you can find in the Linux desktop app browser, letting the handheld double as a PlayStation Portal.)

No other shipping handheld has come close, and while a combination of the Asus ROG Ally X and the SteamOS not-quite-a-fork Bazzite can feel like the best of both worlds, you’ll pay twice the price of an entry level Steam Deck to get it.

I mistakenly thought the most important handheld at CES 2025 was the Lenovo Legion Go S, because Valve’s Steam Deck designers had given it their blessing to become the first authorized third-party SteamOS handheld, but I was wrong. Here’s how I ended my Legion Go S review: “If you’re waiting for a $499 Legion Go S with SteamOS, here’s my advice: just buy a $530 Steam Deck OLED instead.”

While it’s true that new triple-A PC games now require more power than the Steam Deck can comfortably give you, Valve has consistently said that it will wait until it can provide a “leap” in performance without sacrificing battery life before it introduces a Steam Deck 2, and that it won’t be using this year’s AMD Z2 chips.

Between that promise, the many excellent new games that do target Steam Deck, the high prices of new Nvidia GPUs, and the idea that new Microsoft and Sony handhelds are likely a few years away, I don’t think there are all that many reasons to wait to buy today’s Steam Deck — unless the Nintendo Switch 2 somehow supplants the Steam Deck as the handheld that game developers prefer to target with games.