Based on what? I don't think anyone can say that with any amount of confidence.
The base UX is extremely simplistic, it looks just like any other console. The average Joe isn't brain dead.
At least 95% of gamers are familiar with both Nintendo and Valve, neither is far more obscure than the other. And Steam has a higher daily active user count than any of the big three.
Your average retailer like Wal-Mart or Target has all the gaming and electronics stuff in the same place. And there are undoubtedly a ton of parallels/similarities you can draw between Switch and Steam Deck. It makes all the sense in the world to set up demo kiosks for the two products right next to each other. That potentially drives up sales for both products.
maybe in your country they have stuff next to each other, here pc are on one zone and consoles on another closer to tv section.
95% of the gamers? that is where you fail, if consoles were only sold to the gamer they wouldnt sell anything at all.
you cant sell 100+ million units by selling only to the gamer, most people game on their phones nowadays and most of them dont know steam, arent they gamers? i doubt that 95% of the people that play games know steam at all, specially when the large numbers would be kids and they either play on the consoles or their phones and not on steam.
Steam is a online store so if they dont buy games on pc they never heard of it. Where i work only i have a switch, but 4 more people have ps5 consoles, and none of them are pc gamers, they dont know about steam because they buy the ps5 they see on tv, to play fifa and fortnite and all that stuff, they are the majority of sales of consoles which are casual gamers, they dont see conferences or watch announcements of company's on social media, they just see tv adds, or friends talk about which games are hot and they try them.
Based on what? I don't think anyone can say that with any amount of confidence.
They are already selling pre orders of q2 of 2022 so how the hell would they even have stock to put on retailers? maybe if this fails and around 2023 you can get some units on retail if they are trying to dismiss all the stock?
Its been 9 months and sony and microsoft cant put consoles on retailers besides the pre orders because of the lack of stock and they are hardware manufacturers with years of experience. and you think steam would do magic and can produce enough to spread around the world until the end of the year?
Also you forgot one thing you said this only costed 50$ than the switch but you are wrong becuase this has no dock included and i have no idea what steam will even charge for the dock, so this is portable only so it would be the equivalent of the switch lite which goes around 199$ so even the cheapest steamdeck cost twice more than the switch, and i bet with dock it will cost much more than the switch.