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?

  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
    5·
    2 hours ago

    In the Steam hardware survey, under Video Card Description, you can find: Steam Deck GPU - 0.45%.

    Random sources online for which I cannot find a source (though I didn’t really look much) say Steam has 132 million monthly active users.

    If we take both of those figures at face value, assume being a monthly active user on Steam is a good proxy for “in use”, then that makes 594,000 Steam Decks in active use.

    This is far less than the sales figure that @breadsmasher@lemmy.world cited, which could be a combination of a lot of factors:

    1. Steam Decks which have been sold but are not in active use for whatever reason.
    2. The monthly active users figure for Steam seems low to me for a platform as big as Steam. It could be wrong.
    3. It is possible that Steam Deck users are under-represented in the Steam Hardware Survey, and they make up a bigger percentage of Steam users. Maybe they are less likely to participate in it?
    4. People might be using Steam Deck for other purposes besides Steam, so they are not active Steam users. Personally I doubt this is a significant factor.
    5. Some users might participate in the hardware survey more than once, causing the calculation to be wrong. I’m not sure how the hardware survey works, but this could be a huge factor.
    6. Who know what else I didn’t think of.
    • ericwdhs@discuss.online
      4·
      56 minutes ago

      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.

      • thingsiplay@lemmy.mlOP
        1·
        14 minutes ago

        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.

    • thingsiplay@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      1 hour ago

      Oh wait, since when do they have the Steam Deck named in the stats properly? This is quiet nice.

      As for the information about how many Steam users are active each month, there was an official statement by Valve. You can find it here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3133946090937137591 . Given that the daily active users peak in Steam is much higher now, we can assume that the monthly active users is higher too. There are estimated to the current number of 200 million at the moment: https://www.pcguide.com/news/new-report-suggests-steam-now-has-over-200-million-users-making-it-over-50-larger-than-playstation/ Who knows.

      So 0.45% of 200 million estimated would be 900,000. If this was true, it would be much less. It could also that Steam Deck users don’t get the survey as often or they decide not to send. The Steam hardware survey itself is an estimation based on the “few” surveys they got. At last I would expect that sales figures are higher than monthly active users number. The hardware is getting older and older, some may have moved to an alternative handheld or even to a PC. Or they have a newer OLED version alongside the LCD now.

      All things considered, under 1 million users is less than I expected.