u/commander

I did not make an argument for why you would not make the purchase. I'm making the argument that it won't be scarce later in the year because gamepads for PC don't sell in the volumes like consoles. They're not used at volume as consoles. People will buy it. People that already have gamepads are less likely to buy it, but they may still buy it. I am addressing the OP who is asking opinions on likelihood of the controller being scarce later in the year

I didn't say it would be a rare thing. The question is whether someone believes the steam controller will be hard to get later in the year as stated in the OPs post. I do not believe it will be hard to get

what percentage of the 10 million people do you expect to buy a steam controller and how much would that compare to playstation, nintendo and xbox owners? That's 10 million steam gamers that already have gamepads to play on steam and the other 85% playing with I'm assuming mouse and keyboard. PS5 has sold ~100 million where each package in a gamepad plus all the additional that you see in stores and have been purchased. Do you believe this steam controller will be hard to find and why? It seems to me that the manufacturing of gamepads is not a struggle considering how many are available and that the steam controller has a release date already rather than the machine or frame

I'm certain it won't be a problem past a month. Primary input on PC is mouse and keyboard. The primary users for this gamepad will be steam machine owners. The controller for now requires steam. Some sunset of ~150 million people will buy this. I'd be surprised if this sold to even 10% in 5 years. It'll be competing with the likes of 8bitdo and others that while they may have less buttons, no trackpad, it's the amount of buttons devs design around. Steam controllers until they become overwhelmingly popular along with other controllers that mimic it, those rear buttons won't be essential for gamepad native games. Steam controllers have nice to haves rather than being the minimum needed. Vast majority of gamers would be served by a $30 8bitdo perfectly well for their uses

I'd expect the PlayStation and Xbox regular first party controllers and maybe even the premium first party consoles controllers to sell more than this and they don't seem to have supply problems. Those are essential to the console experience. Steam controller is not to PC gaming

That controller is the lynchpin for making a mini PC my future home theater center. I care for it more than the steam machine

This is one of those things that after a few years, is going to become a heavyweight feature that every other storefront should have been working to have but for some reason haven't started yet like Steam Input or WINE/Proton/Linux integration. I imagine in the near future retro-handhelds mostly abandoning Android for Linux and basing their specs and marketing around some analytics done on Steam games and the crowd-sourced game performance data. PS4 is in its 13th year. Blink and next thing you know you'll be seeing cheap mini handhelds advertising playing vintage PS4 era video games on your bought from AliExpress PSP sized retro gaming handheld. It'll be advertised like 98% of games released before 2020 have been found to run well on hardware as powerful as this gaming device (*according to Steam user data)

on a deck for me a microsd is for old emulated games. Everything else I'm fine deleting and restoring over the local network from my desktop or from a NAS especially when I plug the thing straight into the router

Good stuff. The Frame is going to be pretty major in another tangential way. Right now the best mobile SoC to emulate PC games on Android is the 8 Gen 3. Comparing what ragtag teams in the open source world do with Proton/Fex/box64 in the Android world compared to Valve with the same tech but with full time employees in the primary linux world will be a great comparison for what can conceivably be done with our mobile phones

Valves the only one with a major digital store. Everyone else is making money off hardware margin and frequent hardware releases. I want a smaller one though. Pretty much a Switch 2 sized handheld. Maybe even smaller. Different levels of portability. Like I don't need to be on a device that can run at 15-30w like current Steam Deck competitors when I'm just trying to play Persona 5 on an airplane. You can play that set at lowest TDP on a Steam Deck and hit 30fps