When the ROG Xbox Ally launched earlier this year, there was a lot of anticipation about whether it'd be the handheld gaming PC to finally rival Valve's market-leading Steam Deck. Well, there's bad news for both Asus and Microsoft, with senior games journalist Mat Piscatella offering an update in a new podcast, and it looks like the Steam Deck remains the leader of the pack.
In the Xbox Expansion Pass podcast, Piscatella explains that the ROG Xbox Ally "had a nice month one and has come back down quite significantly since then. And you know, you're not talking massive amounts of volume there." When asked whether the handheld has "put a dent in the Steam Deck," Piscatella simply answered with "Nope, although now it might, since you can't buy a Steam Deck." That last part of the answer refers to the ongoing Steam Deck stock shortage that we reported on a little earlier this month, and it's important to note that Piscatella's tone there seems pretty tongue-in-cheek.
In terms of quality, we were impressed by both the ROG Xbox Ally and the premium ROG Xbox Ally X, the latter earning an 8/10 score in our review and a place in our guide to the best Steam Deck rivals. There are a lot of potential reasons why the handheld might have struggled to achieve massive sales numbers, from a relatively steep $599.99 price point, or $999.99 for the Ally X, to the fact that it launched more than three years after the Steam Deck's launch, but that's purely speculation on my part at the time of writing.
In all fairness, the ROG Xbox Ally isn't the only handheld that has failed to come close to the Steam Deck's impressive sales numbers. According to a report from around this time last year, 50% of handheld gaming hardware sales in 2023 were for the Steam Deck, with 48% of sales going in the same direction in 2024. That means that, for a long time, Valve was selling almost as many handhelds as the Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw combined. We don't have the data for 2025 yet, but given this update from Piscatella, we can imagine it's a pretty similar picture.
While Valve's dominance might be impressive, it can still only call itself the market leader in the handheld PC gaming market. In terms of the wider handheld arena, Nintendo is the clear champion. The Japanese gaming giant recently revealed that it had already sold 17.37 million Nintendo Switch 2 units since the console launched back in June 2025, while the original Switch sits at 155.37 million units. That number is likely to get more impressive with some of the upcoming Switch games, such as Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave, Pokémon Pokopia, and Yoshi and the Mysterious Book.