Sales are relative, selling in the millions does not equal crap for most products, just as Apple selling 100m iPhones in one year doesn't mean console sales are crap. 

This is most likely about what Valve is expecting out of this.

I think there is a disconnect with how some posters here perceive some products. Especially obvious when we had posts about how products like these are going to significantly cut into Switch 2 sales. Or even expecting something like the PS portal to do significant numbers.

The only way these PC handhelds matter is that they make hardcore power focused gamers less likely to buy Nintendo handhelds and instead buy a more expensive, better spec PC handheld, but those kind of gamers aren't possible for Nintendo to compete for in any case.

I think these are solid sales for what they are and where they are sold. It was never for me, since I've never played a steam game before, but this was always for the hardcore steam gamer.

Seems right about the amount you would expect from a device that isnt advertised as much and only sold through the Steam store.

I would have gotten it but the games are not clocked offline unfortunately, I'll get a gaming laptop for that but even that I'm avoiding it.

I'll just stick with my Switch and iPhone for gaming portable and stick with my gaming desktops for PC gaming.

Yeah the enthusiast bubble is a real thing; if you only listened to internet forums you'd think nobody bought a Wii, the Gamecube sold 100 million plus, and the Steam Deck dethroned the Switch. It's easy to forget that those of us who take the time to post on gaming forums make up like 0.1% of the total gaming audience.

it's indeed a very niche device.

It will be interesting to see what it sells lifetime, and if the Switch 2 has any impact on it; I suspect a lot of Steam Deck's sales came from people who wanted to play on the go with games/graphics that the current Switch couldn't handle, so a successor that's more powerful and can run modern AAA titles might have more overlap.

My Problem with the Steam Deck is that the games I play on my PC are either fully mouse-driven or use a fair chunk of the keyboard, both very hard to properly replicate with a Steam Deck (or any gamepad for that matter). I find the idea very intriguing, but it simply isn't for me.

On that note, I think quite a few were also driven back by the performance of the Steam deck, which is by now more comparable to a low-end APU. That being said, with more modern CPU and GPU architectures (especially the CPU, which is still based on Zen2) and more memory bandwidth Valve could now create a Steam deck that more than twice as powerful for the same power draw.

On the same note, I hope AMD will create some new Z-line chips with less than 15W power draws. The current Z2 lineup is very much lowest-possible effort from AMD (The Z2 Go is a Ryzen 3 7335 with it's full GPU unlocked (12 instead of just 4 CU), the Z2 is just a rebranded Ryzen 7 7840U and the Z2 Extreme a Ryzen AI 7 Pro 360 with the full GPU unlocked (16 instead of 12CU). They really should make a special chip for handhelds, who simply have no need for such stuff like an NPU and more balanced towards the GPU instead of the CPU.

I think the time is right for steam boxes again or one singular steam box. Perhaps a Steam Deck 2 that has a dock would be more likely but I think the market is there for a steam box that works with PS5/Xbox controllers. Something around the 500 Euro mark or just a little over. I'd buy one this time around as long as they don't try to push their own controller alongside and hopefully release alongside a Portal like device that streams from it to replace the steak deck. As long as they get the pricing right and it beats base ps5/XSX by a comfortable enough margin but also powerful enough so the PS6/next box doesn't seem like a big jump, I'd be in or perhaps two units, one that competes slightly above PS5 for that price and one that aims to compete slightly above ps6 for a price around that of the PS5 PRO. Hopefully something that could do VR with use of any third party headset including META quest and a browser enough for peoples VR porn with ease of use. it'd sell now into the double digits, I do believe as long as it is one singular focus. Even 10-20 million is enough to get a chunk of console gamers pulled away from the console space and more attracted to steam meaningfully enough to make it worth it and eating some cost on the hardware would be worth it for such numbers.