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?
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.