This article includes sales estimates for different handhelds from market research firm IDC.
They place total handheld PC sales of the Steam Deck, RoG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw at almost 6 million units for the past 3 years. It’s estimated that the Steam Deck makes up between 3.7 to 4 million of those sales, more than all the other major handheld PC manufacturers combined.
I strongly doubt that considering the head-to-head specs of the Z2 Go vs the Sephiroth APU. They’re both 4c/8t but the Z2 has significantly faster base clock and turbo on both the CPU & GPU, as well as more compute & shader units, and hardware raytracing.
The Z1 Extreme in the original Legion Go also dominates over the Deck with even higher clocks, and an 8c/16t CPU. Plus with Bazzite you get a SteamOS-like experience.
However you’re 100% right about the fact that Valve don’t necessarily care about the Deck making money. They made it to create a market segment that makes them more profits on Steam, and to encourage the push towards Linux gaming due to their long-term cold war with Microsoft. What I’d actually love to see them do is a Steam Deck Pro with the Z2 Extreme and a 1440p display. Maybe with a bottom USB-C port, a proper dock and a revamped Steam Controller.
It’s more powerful in a different way. Read this and you’ll know what I’m talking about. :)