Valve don't exactly like to give out sales numbers, so we often have to make educated guesses but sometimes with huge hits like Black Myth: Wukong, it gives us a slightly clearer idea on how the Steam Deck is actually selling.
A particularly fun bit:
So then, how about Fortnite on Linux / Steam Deck? Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said when it hits “tens of millions of users” that it “would actually make sense to support it”. We must be pretty close by now right? Why ignore a platform that’s sold multiple millions, and is clearly just continuing to fly off the shelves?
He doesn’t actually do the calculation required to give an estimate of what that number is.
Going on the stats in the article:
assuming that Wukong has just surpassed the revenue of Steam Deck in the chart so we can treat their revenues as equal
assuming Wukong price is $49.99 and average Steam Deck price is $500
using the stat that 14m copies of Wukong sold on Steam so far
that would imply ~1.4m Steam Decks sold
The article does go on to say:
Keep in mind that by November last year, Valve said the Steam Deck had already sold “multiple millions”.
So really this (very rough estimate) is telling us nothing that we didn’t know already. The top seller charts are showing exactly what we would have expected to see.
All this assumes the top selling list is automatically generated based on sales data and not human-curated like most “top/trending” lists on many platforms.
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He doesn’t actually do the calculation required to give an estimate of what that number is.
Going on the stats in the article:
that would imply ~1.4m Steam Decks sold
The article does go on to say:
So really this (very rough estimate) is telling us nothing that we didn’t know already. The top seller charts are showing exactly what we would have expected to see.
The top seller chart only covers around 2 weeks of time if I recall right, and the Steam Deck has been near the top of it for years now.
So that would make it 1.4m in the last two weeks which makes a big difference.
It would have been nice for the article to actually discuss these specifics. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to take away from it.
All this assumes the top selling list is automatically generated based on sales data and not human-curated like most “top/trending” lists on many platforms.
I think it is reasonable to assume Valve will leverage automation heavily. Why pay someone to update that list when a script could do it?