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.
Eh, I literally played Alyx on a gaming laptop with a 1060 in front of my dining room table in no more than a 3x3 cube with a $300 headset. That is not a very high barrier to entry for existing pc gamers at least. A Steam Deck exclusive may fare a little better since itās a self contained console, but I doubt it would do that much better if VR was enough to discourage people tbh
Thatās good that you were able to do that with that specific game, but would all VR games work in that space? After all, you wouldnāt be getting it to play one game.
I mean, I played most of my library in that space. I āSā ranked plenty of Beat Saber maps on Hard. Played Space Pirate Trainer a few times. The Lab. Phasmophobia. Etc. You can genuinely easily play most VR games seated if you really wanted to, even if itās not as nice as having standing room
I needed more room to not hit things when I used it, but I am pretty clumsy. Must be a skill issue.