Valve don't exactly like to give out sales numbers, so we often have to make educated guesses but sometimes with huge hits like Black Myth: Wukong, it gives us a slightly clearer idea on how the Steam Deck is actually selling.
A particularly fun bit:
So then, how about Fortnite on Linux / Steam Deck? Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said when it hits "tens of millions of users" that it "would actually make sense to support it". We must be pretty close by now right? Why ignore a platform that's sold multiple millions, and is clearly just continuing to fly off the shelves?
The steam deck is user repairable, has very good hardware, is reasonably priced, and has fully customisable software.
Obviously can't speak for everyone but those reasons are why Valve got my custom. Personally I think it's a fantastic device and I can't praise it enough. Buying one was a no brainer for me.
The article says "no need for steam deck 2". Valve is on record saying they wouldn't do an incremental upgrade, they want to wait until there's a major advance in the available technology.
Even if they were working on it, they wouldn't tell, otherwise a bunch of people would be waiting on the steam deck 2 instead of buying the current one.
Specs are the same, the APU is just now 6nm instead of 7nm which is more efficient and lets it run a few degrees cooler and therefore boost a bit higher without overheating, and the RAM bandwidth went from 88Gb/s to 102Gb/s.
Consensus seems to be somewhere between 5-10% better fps, which means a game that ran at 50 fps might go up to 55, or one that ran at 28 might finally hit 30.
That would be absolutely wonderful. If they could somehow future-proof their board design even if you had to have tech skills to replace it, enthusiasts could do it on their own and people who don't want to could take it to the local tech repair shop.
because itd be a pain for devs to optimize for a platform if said platform changes too often. one of the benefits of a console is that the platforms life is about 7-9 years so both audience and devs dont have to worry much about having to go through the decision of deciding which generation to support.
it would do a LOT of gen 1 steam deck buyers a disservice if a gen 2 one came out faster and a dev arbitrary targets the newer device as the baseline.
Problem with this logic is proton is doing most of the hard work. If it runs on deck it runs on any x86 hardware. Only exception I can think of is shaders. Steam would have to store shader caches for each hardware iteration.
Yep, every competing product, whether it's the rog ally or legion go had to compromise on something and it's usually battery life, which defeats the purpose of having a handheld. I can get close to 4 hours in some games, you can't say the same for the competition putting 1080p VRR panels with high nit values and more powerful GPUs when the SoC itself hasn't reduced in power consumption. I just don't see any compelling reason why valve would make an incremental product like a steam deck pro.
It’s ironic that Tim Sweeney is against Linux as it would give Epic more independence from Microsoft. Doesn’t he want to avoid “gatekeepers” like Apple and Google.
They did sponsor/donate to someone who got the Epic Games Launcher working through wine. Don’t remember the exact details and can’t find a link though.
I think it was a one time grant for lutris or something, not Wine. It wasn't out of their good heart or ethical fibre. It was also a one time thing 5 years ago for so little money that it wouldn't cover even a single developer for a single year.
He doesn't actually do the calculation required to give an estimate of what that number is.
Going on the stats in the article:
assuming that Wukong has just surpassed the revenue of Steam Deck in the chart so we can treat their revenues as equal
assuming Wukong price is $49.99 and average Steam Deck price is $500
using the stat that 14m copies of Wukong sold on Steam so far
that would imply ~1.4m Steam Decks sold
The article does go on to say:
Keep in mind that by November last year, Valve said the Steam Deck had already sold "multiple millions".
So really this (very rough estimate) is telling us nothing that we didn't know already. The top seller charts are showing exactly what we would have expected to see.
All this assumes the top selling list is automatically generated based on sales data and not human-curated like most "top/trending" lists on many platforms.