New figures show Valve's Steam Deck is still by far the biggest selling handheld gaming PC but the form factor isn't really taking off

pcgamer.com:

New figures from research outfit IDC show that Valve's Steam Deck is likely still the most popular handheld gaming PC by far. However, the market for handhelds fell by 50% in 2024 versus 2023 and overall volumes are still very small compared to desktop and laptop gaming PCs, and consoles to boot.

IDC was commissioned by the Verge to break out the best data the research outfit had on handheld gaming PCs. That data covers the biggest players in the handheld market, namely the Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw.

Slightly frustratingly, it does not include Chinese handhelds from GPD, Ayaneo, OneXPlayer and others. However, it's generally thought these are smaller volume products.

Whatever, the numbers go like this. IDC puts overall handheld sales for 2022 at 1,620,000 units. That rose to 2,867,000 units for 2023 before falling back precipitously to 1,485,000 in 2024.

IDC doesn't break those figures down in detail. However, it will say the full 2022 figure is all Steam Deck, while 2023 is in excess of 50% Steam Deck and 48% of 2024's numbers are again Steam Deck.

All told, than means Valve has probably sold about four million Steam Decks to date. Not bad. On the other hand and to provide some context, really roughly around 35 to 50 million desktop gaming graphics cards are sold every year, while the market for gaming laptops these days, again very roughy, is around 30 million units annually.

Console sales are rather cyclical, but annual unit sales of Sony and Microsoft consoles combined are likewise typically measured in the low 10s of millions of units, while the Nintendo Switch has shifted 150 million units since 2017, which works out to about 20 million units a year.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

So, PC gaming handhelds are still a very small niche compared to other gaming PCs and mainstream gaming devices like the big consoles from Sony and Microsoft and arguably the closest