Not to take anything away from the Steam Deck, it’s a very cool piece of hardware, but the Switch 2 beat its lifetime sales in what?
I’m pretty sure they’re doing OK with regards to percentage of units sold/manufactured, especially given they are not doing a worldwide release, and are selling direct to consumer instead of to stores.
In any case I’m not sure what “percentage of units sold/manufactured” implies there. Everybody has some stock of their products. Selling through your stock isn’t much of a metric unless you’re doing limited runs on purpose. If Valve was selling these faster they’d manufacture them faster.
I don’t think they can manufacture them fast enough to keep up with demand, that’s my point.
I wouldn’t know if they are available to buy now, since they aren’t sold in my region, wheras the switch is. Lemme check for switch 2…
It’s not on LATAM Amazon, but it is available for pre-order off “gamestop”. Steam deck is available off LATAM Amazon, but it is a weird on demand import kinda dealie, which is fairly common for some goods down here.
🤷♂️
The point is that their sales methods are apples and oranges, and trying to paint one as successful with the metrics of the other is unproductive. You can say that the switch/switch 2 sold more units than the steam deck, but then you can also say the steam deck sold more games in that time period, since steam probably sells more games in any given time period over the switch digital store, or that the steam deck can run more games.
Both are moot points when comparing them to each other.
I don’t think I can agree. I mean, I’m sure being in Latin America and being at the tail end of support for less global products skews this a bit, but ultimately these are two big global publishers selling globally.
For what it’s worth, Steam is willing to sell me any currently available Steam Deck in my region with 3-5 day delivery. There currently isn’t any Switch 2 stock on Amazon or the local top specialty game retailer. Checking a couple other major retailers it sure seems to be sold out everywhere for now. You’d probably have a better shot at a physical retailer.
So I’m saying that Valve has stock of the Deck and has for ages, at least in the territories it supports through direct sales. Which is expected, the thing is not new anymore, but it suggests that if it needed to ramp up production it could, it just doesn’t have to.
You could argue that this is not apples to apples, and it may not be, but the difference is so large it may not matter. The Switch 1 by itself was about as large as all of Steam combined, let alone the Deck by itself. The Switch 2 did in weeks what took the Deck years to do, crucially at the same price point (the Switch 2 is cheaper than the OLED but more expensive than the LCD). Considering how much of the marketing and the community focused on the Deck being a Switch killer based on the performance advantage it had, I’m going to say they are close enough competitors and the gulf between them is large enough that whatever differences you want to account for are accounted for.
Which, again, doesn’t speak to the quality of either piece of hardware, but it does to the notion that the Deck has been a runaway success or that it has overwhelmed Valve’s expectations.
I’m pretty sure they’re doing OK with regards to percentage of units sold/manufactured, especially given they are not doing a worldwide release, and are selling direct to consumer instead of to stores.
Weirdly so is Nintendo these days.
In any case I’m not sure what “percentage of units sold/manufactured” implies there. Everybody has some stock of their products. Selling through your stock isn’t much of a metric unless you’re doing limited runs on purpose. If Valve was selling these faster they’d manufacture them faster.
I don’t think they can manufacture them fast enough to keep up with demand, that’s my point.
I wouldn’t know if they are available to buy now, since they aren’t sold in my region, wheras the switch is. Lemme check for switch 2…
It’s not on LATAM Amazon, but it is available for pre-order off “gamestop”. Steam deck is available off LATAM Amazon, but it is a weird on demand import kinda dealie, which is fairly common for some goods down here.
🤷♂️
The point is that their sales methods are apples and oranges, and trying to paint one as successful with the metrics of the other is unproductive. You can say that the switch/switch 2 sold more units than the steam deck, but then you can also say the steam deck sold more games in that time period, since steam probably sells more games in any given time period over the switch digital store, or that the steam deck can run more games.
Both are moot points when comparing them to each other.
I don’t think I can agree. I mean, I’m sure being in Latin America and being at the tail end of support for less global products skews this a bit, but ultimately these are two big global publishers selling globally.
For what it’s worth, Steam is willing to sell me any currently available Steam Deck in my region with 3-5 day delivery. There currently isn’t any Switch 2 stock on Amazon or the local top specialty game retailer. Checking a couple other major retailers it sure seems to be sold out everywhere for now. You’d probably have a better shot at a physical retailer.
So I’m saying that Valve has stock of the Deck and has for ages, at least in the territories it supports through direct sales. Which is expected, the thing is not new anymore, but it suggests that if it needed to ramp up production it could, it just doesn’t have to.
You could argue that this is not apples to apples, and it may not be, but the difference is so large it may not matter. The Switch 1 by itself was about as large as all of Steam combined, let alone the Deck by itself. The Switch 2 did in weeks what took the Deck years to do, crucially at the same price point (the Switch 2 is cheaper than the OLED but more expensive than the LCD). Considering how much of the marketing and the community focused on the Deck being a Switch killer based on the performance advantage it had, I’m going to say they are close enough competitors and the gulf between them is large enough that whatever differences you want to account for are accounted for.
Which, again, doesn’t speak to the quality of either piece of hardware, but it does to the notion that the Deck has been a runaway success or that it has overwhelmed Valve’s expectations.