Steam Deck shipments might reach 1 million units by early 2023

Valve hasn’t disclosed any official numbers for Steam Deck yet. However, the latest estimates suggest that the company might ship up to 1 million devices by early 2023.

This according to GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, who brought up some stats in a recent episode of his newsletter.

• Carless cited an Ars Technica report, which said that “roughly 77,000 Steam Deck systems were in the wild when Valve’s process automatically gathered data in the final week of May.”
• These numbers are based on Steam’s hardware survey and the platform’s MAU data.
• According to analyst Brad Lynch, the share of Linux players using Steam Deck’s APU grew from 5.2% to 7.57% in June. This means that there are now over 100,000 portable PCs “in the wild”.
• Considering that Valve recently promised to double shipments, it can deliver around 20,000 Steam Decks per week. “So perhaps we’ll get to 1 million Decks shipped by early next year, depending on supply chain issues?” Carless estimates.

He also noted that smaller indie developers still should better focus on selling their games to regular PC players rather than trying to optimize them for Valve’s new device. The thing is that most Steam Deck users, unlike other console players, launch titles that they already have in their library. So developers shouldn’t consider Steam Deck a sales driver, at least for now.