The title says it all, but I don’t want to have an empty body. There are no official statement for recent Steam Decks sold, that are Steam account activated and in active use. I’m not really interested into how many are sold (although I suspect that most in the wild are also in use for gaming).
In example I’ve read in the past that the military of a certain country (don’t want name it, so we avoid triggering political topics) purchased and used Steam Decks for a mobile platform as a general purpose computer, rather than Steam. Use cases like these should be in the minority, but interesting nonetheless.
Maybe the Steam Hardware survey or Linux only stats is a good way of estimating?
I have a Steam Deck I would consider to be in active use, but it’s a secondary system for me, and the times I’m using it most heavily are done without Internet. I don’t believe it’s ever been counted in a survey, and I imagine there’s a bunch of users in the same situation.
The same kind of thing used to happen with VR headsets before they switched it to counting any headset used in the last 30 days (determined by whether the driver was launched). I always used to get the survey when mine wasn’t plugged in, and it always annoyed me to not be counted in the VR userbase. Lol.
For the survey it does not matter how often you use it or how you use it, with or without internet. If you got the survey and accepted to send the data to Valve, then you are counted in that month. Otherwise not.
As I understand it, the survey flags a random sampling of logged in Steam user accounts to run the survey on each month. For each selected user, the survey prompt then pops up the next time they’re online on the device they’re online with as an offline device can’t receive the survey notice.
Let’s say I game with my desktop 20 times per month and my Deck 10 times per month, but I’m only actually connecting it to the Internet 2 times a month for updates. In that scenario, it seems the desktop would be 10 times more likely to get the survey even though that doesn’t reflect the actual usage spread.
Edit: I should add that this is a slightly different issue than what your original question is getting at. You want the raw active user count, in which case I should be 100% reported in both the desktop and the Deck counts at the same time. As far as I know, Steam does not do that.
Oh I see what you mean. You are absolutely right. Using the device less often or mostly in offline mode will drastically reduce the chance of getting the survey.