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?
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.
Yeah, the inverse problem also exists, multiple users on a single device causing that device to get over-reported. This is most commonly seen with cyber cafes in Asia. The effect is present all year (and is another reason to expect the actual Deck percentage to be slightly higher), but it spikes every February as Chinese cyber cafes get busy over Lunar New Year.