Three years later, handheld PC gaming has evolved beyond niche
May 23, 2025It’s been a bit more than three years since the Steam Deck landed, popularizing a way of gaming that, at its best, was a high-priced hobbyist pursuit.
While the Deck wasn’t the first handheld gaming PC (that honor goes to the Pandora, which hit in 2010), it was the first to spark the sort of interest that would lead to similar systems from several PC manufacturers, the desire to track sales by market research group IDC, and a push for a new type of chip from AMD.
In May of 2022, months after the release of the Steam Deck, I chatted with AMD about its decision to design chips specifically for the relatively new handheld gaming systems.
Frank Azor, co-founder of Alienware, former head of Dell’s gaming and XPS divisions, and now AMD’s chief architect of gaming solutions and marketing, told me at the time that AMD saw this as an entirely new category in gaming. The last time such a thing happened was more than 20 years ago when the first gaming laptops hit the market.
Three years ago, he said that the release of the ASUS ROG Ally would be a milestone, a marker along the path that will see a niche market grow into a major facet of PC gaming.
Earlier this month, I looked Azor up again to chat about how things have shaken out in the three years since he said that.
In a word: Great.
To continue reading this column hop over to Game, where it ran originally on May 23, 2025.
