Valve Clarifies Whether a New Steam Deck Is on the Way

3.7

Valve's Steam Deck handheld has been available for purchase for just over a year at this point, and one of the people working on the device has explained what the odds are of seeing a Steam Deck 2. While the popularity of the device cannot be denied, most users seem to agree that it's not perfect by any meaningful measure, and there are things that a potential successor could do better.

One of the things that make the Steam Deck special is Valve's eagerness to engage with the community and work with the end-user to make the handheld better. This led to a whole slew of post-release software upgrades already, and with beta builds of SteamOS already underway, Valve is unlikely to stop working on the device anytime soon.

To celebrate the Deck's first year of availability, Rock Paper Shotgun invited Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais and designer Lawrence Yang to discuss all manner of topics relating to the device. Griffais and Yang confirmed that there are more Steam Deck performance improvements in the pipeline, but they also talked about the importance of future "value-add features" for the device, such as ray tracing support and HDR for external displays. It's no surprise that the topic of a potential Steam Deck 2 got brought up along the way as well, only for Yang to clarify without mincing words: "A true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn’t be for a few years."

In other words, those who might've been worried about experiencing buyer's remorse over buying a "last-gen" Steam Deck shouldn't be concerned. Valve is currently interested in making the most out of its baseline handheld, and this approach combined with unofficial performance tweaks for Steam Deck will ensure that it's got a long shelf-life compared to almost all the other PC gaming handhelds on the market.

It may be worth highlighting, of course, that Yang was very deliberate and precise with what he said. His comment leaves plenty of room for a sort of mid-generation refresh of the Steam Deck. The community has been vocal about its desire for an upgraded Steam Deck that would go toe-to-toe with Nintendo's Switch OLED console. Similarly, some believe a bigger battery might be in order too.

While the device is admirably flexible in most respects, Steam Deck can't play Destiny 2, for example, which reveals an underlying issue with Valve's reliance on Linux as its operating system of choice. Specifically, some developers simply don't want to support a non-Windows OS, and there's precious little Valve can do about that problem, even when it comes to a potential Steam Deck 2.