Valve site Boiling Steam has shared some distressing news about the Steam Deck.
Based on their metrics analysis, sales of Valve’s gaming handheld have dropped by as much as 82 % since they announced price increases.
To get to this figure, Boling Steam analyzed verifiable data, such as Steam’s Weekly Top Seller charts, and data from analytics firms like Alinea and VGInsights. You can read the details of their methodology here and here.
But Boiling Steam has a clear explanation of what happened to Valve’s hardware. Their charts showed earlier sales drops this year, including a period when no units are sold. But this happened because Valve experienced supply shortages.
After they brought the Steam Deck OLED back however, things were much different. They raised prices on both the 512 GB and 1 TB model, after discontinuing other cheaper models. This is a price increase of as much as 54 % for the platform
Boiling Steam also noted that the Steam Deck experienced a revenue contraction of 72 %, which all came together to get to their 82 % unit sales decline.
While Valve’s peers are also struggling with similar issues, the way they do business may cause particular harm to their hardware.
