Steam Deck sales plummet after May's price hike
The Steam Deck has seen a sharp decline in sales since its May price increase, with estimates suggesting weekly units sold may have dropped by about 80% compared to 2025 levels. According to Boiling Steam analysis, the handheld's chart position fell from 5th to 14th in early July.
Since its launch in 2022, the Steam Deck consistently ranked near the top of Valve's "top selling products by revenue" charts, with brief drops outside the top 10 considered newsworthy. However, sales of the popular handheld gaming PC have apparently declined steeply since the system resumed sales at a higher price in May.
Linux-focused gaming site Boiling Steam analyzed historical data, showing how the Deck's chart position fell from fifth place immediately after orders resumed in late May to 14th place for two weeks in early July (currently sitting at 12th). This contrasts sharply with 2025, when the Steam Deck never dropped below seventh place and was rarely outside the top five.
Valve had warned of "intermittent shortages" starting in February, leading to weeks of lower chart positions before the Deck became completely unavailable until May. Boiling Steam performed rough calculations to translate revenue-based chart positions into estimated unit sales. Based on assumptions about average sale prices across hardware models (both before and after the price hike) and estimated weekly revenues for surrounding games on the charts, the model suggests Steam Deck sales may have fallen by approximately 80% from a 2025 baseline of about 11,000 to 18,000 units per week to a current estimate of just 1,400 to 3,000 per week. While there is significant uncertainty in these estimates, any numbers close to these would reflect a major slowdown for a device that sold an estimated 4 million units in its first three years.
