"It's a real product launch, so many thousands of people right away are going to receive Decks as soon as we're able to ship them," Coomer said. "But even talking about thousands would be quite low compared to the volumes we're shooting for in the first few months."
Valve hasn't disclosed how many Steam Deck pre-orders it's gotten, but Coomer pointed out that the Steam Deck's launch is different than many other hardware launches, where companies need to supply thousands of retail stores. For now the Deck is only being sold through Steam.
"We're going to have a launch that looks like a significant number of users right out of the gate, and then build that over time, rather than having the biggest splash on day one and then generally declining after that," he said. "If you extend the timeline out through 2022 and all the way to 2023, we expect to be building on our numbers constantly throughout that whole time, to the point where there's many millions of customers if things go the way we think they will, who are using Steam Deck by the end of that year or so, through 2023."