Steam Deck 2 Still Several Years Away

Yesterday Valve announced its Steam Deck OLED featuring a new OLED display alongside several other improvements to the handheld keeping it up in line with the competition. However, the question also stands on the Steam Deck’s next entry, asking what and when.

Steam Deck 2

The sequel to the Steam Deck has previously been spoken about in an interview with The Verge back in September. The interview was with Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais who effectively said that the Steam Deck 2 won’t arrive until there is a considerable leap in the technology behind the handheld which is a good position to take for consumers. With the reveal of the OLED variant, another interview was conducted by Bloomberg (Via VideoCardz) with various product designers at Valve.

Jay Shaw and Lawrence Yang from Valve both claimed to be happy with the market position of the Steam Deck currently and with the new model and whilst Deck 2 is being planned, it won’t be for at least another 2 to 3 years when we’ll find out about it.

“I don’t know, It’ll be a while. I think it’ll be quite a while. We don’t have any kind of set date. I Think we’re going to wait for the technology to present itself in a way that we find interesting and for the team to really want to make that leap. We’re very, very, very proud of this version of Steam Deck and this is it. This is the one that we’re the most happy with and we think customers will be too.

So we’re thinking about Steam Deck 2 at all times, but i think we’re so satisfied here that this is really the kind of high end of what we do.” – Jay Shaw, Steam Deck Designer.

What About The Competition?

With Valve’s stance known, we do have to wonder how the big-name competition in the form of ASUS and Lenovo is going to handle their future iterations. I’d imagine a similar waiting approach will be taken from both of these big-name companies and they may even also release some form of a refresh down the line. Of course, these three aren’t the only ones in the handheld market as smaller companies such as the likes of Ayaneo are also around.

They’re a bit different though as they are focused entirely on handhelds and despite only starting in 2020, already have several models available with 5 on their store. With the scale of Lenovo, Valve and ASUS, handhelds aren’t their product focus so yearly releases just aren’t going to be profitable for them.