The simple answer to this question is:
nobody knows how many Steam Deck units are out in the wild, and Valve has never officially released stats on it. But we have some data points that we’d like to present, and a guesstimate at the end of it.
Firstly, we know that Deck pre-orders started in February 2022, as mentioned above, and there was
a leak from KDE Linux’s David Edmundsen in October 2022 that 1 million Deck units had shipped. (A culinary leak in Nov. 2022 backed that up.)
So this is a good starting point. But we’re in October 2023, and we know that hardware production ramped up & pre-orders were
all shipped out by October 2022, which likely increased the pace of devices sold.
If we just
pretended the same speed from February to October 2022 continued until October 2023, we’d be at
somewhere around 2.5 million Steam Decks in the wild. We think this is conservative, though.
Why? We took a
look at owners of Valve’s Steam Deck demo Aperture Desk Job, which we presume a majority of - but not all - Steam Deck owners grabbed. We’re estimating (via
GamingAnalytics.info data)
2.9 million owners and 1.6 million players of that software toy/game.
It’s possible that some non-Deck owners grabbed Aperture Desk Job just to add to library, of course. But with a combination of these two extrapolations, we’d
guesstimate between 3 and 4 million Steam Deck owners ‘in the wild’ right now.