Steam Deck sales drop hard following the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement
Valve's Steam Deck with SteamOS has been consistently in the top sales charts on Steam since release, but recently it dropped down rather hard following the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement.
It will be back . Nintendo's catalog is very limited still by comparison to steam and they are peculiar about what they allow on their platform. I think its too early to say anything concrete without more data.
Also fuck Nintendo and their litigious nature 🖕
Peculiar about what they allow on their platform
Have you seen the shit that the Switch Eshop is? There's just a much garbage on it as Steam. At least Steam doesn't have a seizure if I go to another search filter.
The Switch catalog was limited in no small part because the device just couldn't give acceptable performance for a lot of contemporary cross-platform games. That, of course, didn't matter for first-party titles.
Switch 2 performance is projected to end up somewhere around a base PS4, with better GPU but somewhat diminished CPU. However, it's going to have more memory than the Xbox Series S that teams had trouble porting their games to.
The Switch 2 might benefit a lot from this generation's extended cross-gen period. Add that to franchises like Fire Emblem, Metroid, Mario, Mario Kart, Pikmin and Zelda, and the average consumer is going to think of Steam as the "limited" platform.
A lot of conjecture, and maybe Switch 2 will turn out to be a monumental flop. I'm cautiously optimistic.
By the way, the old, selective policy that Nintendo exercised is pretty much a thing of the past. Just browse through the eShop for three minutes.
Here's a link to a non gamingonlinux source: https://www.pcguide.com/news/nintendo-switch-2-announcement-is-probably-the-reason-why-steam-deck-sales-just-plummeted/
Oh and it's already back near the top: https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topsellers
Update #2 8:07PM: seems Valve got the message, and they've updated it. The Steam Deck on the weekly global top seller for the week beginning January 14th was actually 4th, not 47th.
Not cause of the rumors AMD started around SteamDeck 2?
I would also add other handhelds like the Legion Go that are starting to use Steam OS.
It was actually the retroid pocket 5 announcement :-)
Did steam deck sales actually drop, as in the number of sold units went down? Or did the Steam Deck's relative ranking on some leaderboard drop to a lower ranking?
Its ranking has dropped by 44 spots on Steam's top sellers list. Unless the sales numbers of everything else have shot up significantly, that implies that sales of the Steam Deck have gone down. I don't know how significant it is because I don't know how the rankings are done, but it's a pretty big drop for a 2-week period.
