Steam Deck sales drop hard following the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement

Update 11:21AM: it's possible the weekly global top sellers list is having issues, as it's been pointed out some clearly top selling games vanished from the last week. I've reached out to Valve to see what's up.

Valve's Steam Deck with SteamOS has been consistently in the top sales charts on Steam since release, but recently it dropped down rather hard following the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement.

I've been tracking the sales over time and have posted a few times about how well it was doing. However, the week during which the Nintendo Switch 2 was announced, it really has dropped down massively to the lowest point since the original release back in February 2022.

Keeping in mind the global Steam sales charts are for revenue, not numbers sold, the Steam Deck is generally higher anyway since it's the equal cost of multiple sales of the most expensive games. Still, it's an interesting look into how the Steam Deck is doing overall and still means usually it's selling a lot considering the games it's up against sell often hundreds of thousands and millions.

Here's how it's position in the weekly global top sellers list has changed:

I guess I need to admit here I was wrong then don't I? Back in July 2024 when I last looked at this I said "Will anything dethrone the Steam Deck? Probably not", seems the Switch 2 did it.

Sales dropping was bound to happen eventually though, one way or another, and I do fully expect it to bounce back, but it's just surprising to see it drop down so drastically like that.

This won't cause any alarm bells to ring at Valve HQ though, they probably expected this to happen too. I don't expect them to speed up any work on a Steam Deck 2 due to this either. Valve clearly have a plan, especially with SteamOS coming to more devices, and they're still waiting for a truly next-generation APU to slot into a Steam Deck 2.