It’s been roughly a year since Valve unveiled and released the Steam Deck, their handheld alternative to PC gaming. Since then, the device has taken the PC gaming market by storm, to the point that Valve finds that 42 percent of its total users use it more than any other gaming platform.
Considering that the Steam Deck offers a much more viable alternative than lugging a gaming PC around, many PC gamers would likely use it to play their PC games in a more comfortable setting, or on the go. Since it can run the vast majority of games on Steam, this isn’t much of a surprise.
The Steam Deck has a variety of advantages over not only a normal PC but many other gaming platforms as well; each of its forms is far cheaper than a good gaming PC, and its base model is cheaper than an Xbox Series X or Playstation 5 ($399). Its other two models are notably more expensive but also more powerful.
The Steam Deck also has a much broader range of popular games that you can play, meaning that you’re not constrained by what a console can do thanks to the huge amount of games that are on Steam. With all of this in mind, it’s no wonder that such a huge amount of owners use their Steam Deck more than any other platform.
This is also helped by the huge amount of different things you can do with a Steam Deck. You can make it into a portable computer, run emulators for games that you can’t play without a certain console, make custom boot videos, and so much more, along with constant hardware and software updates to them from Valve.
It’s likely that with the success of the Steam Deck, the device will continue to be a success, and as more and more people come to own one and more and more games come out for it, we may get even more people abandoning most of their current gaming platforms entirely. But that relies on how gamers treat the Steam Deck in the coming years.