News Steam Deck Becomes Top Seller by Revenue on Steam

[Admin]

The Steam Deck has fought off the likes of Elden Ring and the latest Lego Star Wars to become top seller by revenue. It looks like pre-orders are still hot for the portable gaming PC.

Steam Deck Becomes Top Seller by Revenue on Steam : Read more

 

[ezst036]

This is great news for Linux adoption and gaming on Linux. Increased revenue will mean more resources are devoted to it.(Not that Valve has sat back for the last decade, but still)

Hopefully this leads to more native Linux game ports and less reliance on Proton.

 

[TerryLaze]

Hopefully this leads to more native Linux game ports and less reliance on Proton.

Quite the opposite, with valve putting so much effort into making windows games run devs won't have a lot of incentive to make native ports for linux.

 

[cryoburner]

The popularity of the Steam Deck handheld has become highly evident in recent weeks. For the last five weeks, Valve's AMD Aerith APU-powered portable was second in the top seller by revenue charts. However, it managed to move up to the number one spot over the weekend.

These numbers are not all that meaningful though. The device has been backordered since preorders first opened for it back in July of last year, over 9 months ago, and the launch was pushed back at least a couple months, so whatever sales numbers they are showing now are based on how many of those existing pre-orders they can ship out. It doesn't reflect current sales of the device, but rather the better part of a year's worth of sales, compressed into the time period when they actually started shipping them and charging people's cards.

Ultimately, the Steam Deck seems like a relatively niche device, and it's very possible that most of those interested in it already put in their pre-order many months ago, and once the pre-orders dry up it might not actually sell all that well. The device may have had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, and I imagine it could eventually sell a few million units or more, but compared to the couple-hundred million consoles sold each generation, and a similar number of PCs used for gaming, in addition to a couple-billion mobile gamers, that only amounts to a rather tiny portion of the total market.

Likewise, I would expect Elden Ring's sales are waning at this point, seeing as the game has been out a couple months, and anyone interested in paying full launch price for it likely did so weeks ago. So it's probably less that Steam Deck's pre-order fulfillments pulled ahead, but rather Elden Ring's sales simply fell behind. Making guesses at Steam Deck sales numbers based on pre-order and early sales numbers for Elden Ring is likely going to be hugely inaccurate. And really, there have not been a lot of other big game releases recently, so topping the list shouldn't actually take all that much. The next-highest selling game is currently a Lego Star Wars title, if that says anything.

Quite the opposite, with valve putting so much effort into making windows games run devs won't have a lot of incentive to make native ports for linux.

Yeah, I would expect developers to bother even less with native Linux ports. What is the developer's incentive devote a chunk of their budget and resources to porting the game to yet another platform with a small user-base when things are likely to mostly work even if they don't? A Valve developer commented that any games Steam Deck can't run are considered "bugs", so it's up to Steam to make sure games are able to function on the platform, not the game developers. If a game doesn't run properly, the developer can simply point to Valve for not supporting it adequately.

 

[ezst036]

Quite the opposite, with valve putting so much effort into making windows games run devs won't have a lot of incentive to make native ports for linux.

Yeah, I would expect developers to bother even less with native Linux ports. What is the developer's incentive devote a chunk of their budget and resources to porting the game to yet another platform with a small user-base when things are likely to mostly work even if they don't?

In the short term, I agree with both of you about an incentive deficit. That deficit will keep most companies relying on Photon as its work they don't have to do. In the long term though, it's all about critical mass. We all know that if somehow Linux had 90% or more of the market then gaming companies would all be rushing to get Linux ports out the door and probably wouldn't bother with Windows ports.

So all that's left is for you and I to haggle about the number. Is critical mass 70%? Is it 20%? Or 6%? There is a critical mass number, it's just "where is it". Until that number is reached, yeah, I agree there's an incentive deficit.

As long as the Steam Deck keeps up sales numbers, it's all very encouraging in the correct direction.

 

[TerryLaze]

In the short term, I agree with both of you about an incentive deficit. That deficit will keep most companies relying on Photon as its work they don't have to do. In the long term though, it's all about critical mass. We all know that if somehow Linux had 90% or more of the market then gaming companies would all be rushing to get Linux ports out the door and probably wouldn't bother with Windows ports.

So all that's left is for you and I to haggle about the number. Is critical mass 70%? Is it 20%? Or 6%? There is a critical mass number, it's just "where is it". Until that number is reached, yeah, I agree there's an incentive deficit.

As long as the Steam Deck keeps up sales numbers, it's all very encouraging in the correct direction.

But the steam deck will not change "the mass" at all, it will still be all windows games. The games will not be running on linux, they will still be running on windows, linux will just be able to "simulate" enough of windows to make them run.

 

[Mitsie85]

In the short term, I agree with both of you about an incentive deficit. That deficit will keep most companies relying on Photon as its work they don't have to do. In the long term though, it's all about critical mass. We all know that if somehow Linux had 90% or more of the market then gaming companies would all be rushing to get Linux ports out the door and probably wouldn't bother with Windows ports.

So all that's left is for you and I to haggle about the number. Is critical mass 70%? Is it 20%? Or 6%? There is a critical mass number, it's just "where is it". Until that number is reached, yeah, I agree there's an incentive deficit.

As long as the Steam Deck keeps up sales numbers, it's all very encouraging in the correct direction.

This will never happen, majority of Gamers on windows, buy their laptops/desktops because of their work/school. Gaming is the sideline. Linux's steep learning curve, prevent average home users from using it. You would have to rely on Microsoft closing down their Windows Server, Office, Teams etc. Only then would businesses/education look for alternatives. This is never going to happen. Proton makes it easier for games to play on Linux using basically an emulator. If you can develop a game for Windows and it just works on Linux, why would you even invest your time in a Linux port. You will start to see less Native Linux games and more developers looking for quick fixes for their games to work on proton.