In case there was any doubt (and there really shouldn’t be at this point), the Steam Deck is a major hit. Speaking to The Verge, designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais said Valve’s handheld gaming PC has now sold “multiple millions” of units.
Prior to the Steam Deck, Valve hadn’t had great luck on the hardware front. Both Steam Machines and the Steam Controller were whiffs, and even the undeniably handy Steam Link streaming device didn’t really change the way most of us played our PC games. I’ll be honest, I expected the same from the Steam Deck. PC games are meant to be played at a desk, properly hunched over, with a full keyboard, a many-buttoned mouse, and a monitor blasting luminescence into your eyeballs from two feet away.
Clearly, I was wrong. Steam Decks were in very short supply even before they launched, and it took months before Valve could catch up with demand. Importantly, it also turned out to be very, very good: Senior hardware editor Jacob Ridley, who also had doubts about the unit, declared it “the single most exciting gaming hardware I’ve used in years” after getting his hands on one.
So there’s really no surprise that it’s a sales monster too. Yang and Griffais didn’t specify exactly how many millions of them have been sold, but “multiple” means at least two and I’d be willing to bet the number is a lot higher than that. And with the hot new OLED model now available, that number is bound to climb even higher. Some people—not naming any names here, but Ted—might even end up owning two.
I’ve reached out to Valve to see if they might want to say anything more about just how many Steam Decks they’ve sold, and will update if I receive a reply. In the meantime, if you’re not yet quite convinced, be sure to check out our Steam Deck OLED review—just like the original, it’s really good.
