Undoubtedly the only thing anyone in the PC world will be talking about for the next week is Valve’s trio of hardware announcements, the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame, and their new Steam Controller. But don’t forget about the old Steam Deck just yet! While Valve didn’t announce anything handheld related today, they have commented on where they’re at when it comes to anything like a Steam Deck 2.
Speaking to IGN, Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais shared that there are plans for an upgraded version of the Steam Deck somewhere along the line, it’s just that the technology just isn’t there yet. “Obviously the Steam Deck’s not our focus today, but the same things we’ve said in the past where we’re really interested to work on what’s next for Steam Deck… the thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product,” Griffais said.
He noted how Valve isn’t interested in marginal improvements of performance at the same battery life, and that they “want something a little bit more demarcated than that… and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.”
Not that we should be encouraging hours upon hours of playing games, but battery life is one thing even the Steam Deck OLED struggles with. It does run better than the original Steam Deck, it just also isn’t necessarily all that suited for taking on the go, which is kind of the point of these things. Hopefully Valve have plans bigger than just better battery life. I dislike that new generation of consoles offer uniformly the same experience as their predecessors but with slightly fancier graphics, and don’t want to see that in a hypothetical Steam Deck 2.