Yet another analyst has taken to glazing Nintendo’s upcoming console, the Switch 2.
The Game Business shared this insight on Twitter:
Leading analyst firm Ampere says more Switch 2 consoles will be sold this year than the PC gaming handheld landscape has sold in its entirety. It says that while 56% of Steam Deck owners use a Switch, only 1.3% of Switch owners consider Steam Deck to be their primary console.
For those wondering, the Ampere Analysis report is not free, so if you are willing to spend to see the full context of this report, you can do so here. We thank The Game Business for this insight, but we also rely on them to accurately convey the information in this paid report.
But it’s entirely easy to believe this to be true, even if you had the information to support that belief. As we reported, a February report from another analyst company named IDC found that Valve has sold upwards of 3.7 million Steam Decks, and that the total market share of PC gaming handhelds in total is 6 million overall.
While some fans will focus on how dominant the Steam Deck is over its peers in the Lenovo Legion Go, ASUS ROG Ally, MSI Claw, and others, there is a bigger picture that puts Valve’s handheld in its place. The Sega Game Gear was reported to have sold 10.62 million units by March 1996, a year before it was discontinued. Sega’s oversized, battery hungry portable outsold all of these PC gaming handhelds, in what would have been the equivalent of $ 350 today.
We should remember that as much as we remember the 1990s as a golden age (or perhaps more accurately, a silver age) for retro gaming, the total market for video games was considerably smaller compared to where it is today. PC gaming handhelds may now be numbering in the millions, but it’s still a small niche in the modern video game industry. To put all of this in further perspective, the original Nintendo Switch sold a total of 12.1 million units in December 2017, nine months after launch. We know that the Switch 2 has snowballed in hype and market interest as it is building on what is already the large market base of the original Switch.
In so many words, we already know that the Switch 2 is going to outsell its PC gaming handheld peers by a wide margin. Valve, Lenovo, ASUS, GPD and others have a long way to go to be a threat to Nintendo, even if its users will tout all the advantages it has over their venerable hybrid console. We think Nintendo would be much more concerned about making their launch as smooth and successful as possible, as we all hope they will be able to do.
