Valve Shares Their Targets For Steam Deck 2

Valve’s Steam Deck has proved a very popular choice in the growing handheld PC gaming market although it has been overshadowed in terms of raw power by newer devices such as the ROG Ally or the more recent Lenovo Legion Go, both powered by Ryzen Z1. Despite its weaker chip, the deck sits at a nice price point for those on a tighter budget but the question is out there on when and if Valve will make a more powerful version to compete more directly with these other handhelds.

Valve Shares Information On Steam Deck Successor

Recently Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke to The Verge and CNBC surrounding when they would consider releasing a Steam Deck 2 and the response was that we shouldn’t be expecting one any time soon. Valve is currently eyeing up 2025 or even 2026 before they consider the Steam Deck 2 as they are waiting to see a leap in chip performance that doesn’t have a significant hit to battery life. Pierre Loup Griffais was quoted in an email as saying:

It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple, where every Deck can play the same games. As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be had. We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life. I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years, but we’re still closely monitoring innovations in architectures and fabrication processes to see where things are going there. 

This is a position I can understand as Valve clearly sees it more beneficial to wait for major improvements to better make use of their development time with big leaps in performance rather than a small update to just bring the deck up to par with the Ryzen Z1 based handhelds. This however does not mean that Valve won’t release a refresh of the handheld. Whilst not explicitly stated, Valve could release a more power-efficient model of the current Steam Deck that also fixes a few minor issues with the handheld which is something that Nintendo has done with the Switch involving the OLED refresh and an efficiency refresh.