Itās 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, isnāt a platform. Itās just one hardware optionāone entry point into the sprawling, open ecosystem known as PC gaming.
Every year, around 245 million PCs are shipped globally. If even 20ā25% of those are gaming-focused, thatās 49ā61 million gaming PCs annually. Steam Deck is a sliver of that. So of course it wonāt outsell a console thatās the only gateway to a major IP.
But thatās exactly the point.
PC gaming is too decentralized for any single device to dominate. The last āPCā that did was the Commodore 64, which sold 12.5ā17 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 didnāt just sellāit legitimized a category. Handheld PC gaming is now a thing. Thatās why Lenovo, ASUS, and MSI have followed. Even Microsoft is getting in, optimizing Windows for handheldsāsomething they would never have done if the Steam Deck didnāt hold their feet to the fire.
So no, Steam Deck didnāt outsell the Switch 2. It didnāt need to.
It won by changing the landscape.
There are flaws and benefits to every platform, thatās why they exist otherwise only one would stand the test of time. Thereās a reason why PC gaming continues to march on. It has its flaws, sure, I wouldnāt necessarily say glaring though.
The argument here isnāt that PC gaming is flawless or you can run on literally any hardware or os, thatās silly. Just that itās more flexible and open to choice. I run my Steam library on my Windows PC, Linux PC and steam deck. Games I bought a decade ago can run perfectly fine on all these configurations. Thatās the argument I was making and why your claim of PC being more exclusive seemed so disconnected from the reality of my experiences at least.
Still, itās not an argument to say you should use one platform or the other. Just that they are different and have their pros/cons, flexibility being a huge pro of the PC platform thatās important to some people and less so for others.
Thatās literally what Iām trying to point out? They all have their own quirks. And yet people bicker itās funny.
I point out thereās limitations on PC, and get insulted. The circlejerking against Nintendo and for Steam is just wild on this community.
Well, I donāt know what to tell you then, mate. If thatās all youāre trying to say I donāt think itās particularly controversial. Maybe itās the way youāre saying it.
I insulted sir Gaben, steam and gaben are sacred on Lemmy. I spoke ill and got brigaded, happens to any comments like that. Could do without the blatant insults, surprised the mods allow it, or maybe they just havenāt gotten to it yet.