Valve has clear ideas about what a successor to the Steam Deck must offer.
Valve is taking its time. While other manufacturers of PC handhelds release a successor to their product after just a year, nothing official has been heard of a Steam Deck successor so far.
In an interview, a Valve employee has now revealed why this is the case – and at the same time made it clear what you can expect in terms of performance and battery of a Steam Deck 2.
Who is speaking? The employee is Lawrence Yang. He is one of the designers of the Steam Deck at Valve. In an interview with Reviews.org At the launch of the Steam Deck in Australia, he also shared a few thoughts that Valve has about the next generation of Steam Decks.
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Compact gaming on the rise: What you can expect from Steam Deck & Co. compared to the PC
Im Detail: In the conversation, Yang makes it very clear that they don’t want to renew the Steam Deck every year. There would be no reason for this and at the same time it would be unfair to customers if you came onto the market so soon with something that was a little better than its predecessor.
Instead, Valve has two goals that must be met for a Steam Deck 2:
- A
Generational leap
in performance. Here Yang remains vague about what lies behind it. But it seems to be more than just a slightly better CPU or increased RAM. - Consistent battery life. Better performance should not be bought at the price of a crowbar.
Valve announced something similar about a year ago at the Tokyo Game Show.
In addition to Lawrence Yang, another Valve designer, Yazan Aldehayyat, shared his thoughts on the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED. This also shows what could be improved in a successor. Aldehayyat says:
The general consensus is that the Steam Deck’s battery life is the best of its kind, but I would have liked it to be even better. […] VRR (Variable Refresh Rate, Editor’s Note) was one that we didn’t get the technology ready for before the product launch, but it was something I would have loved to have had.
So it seems quite possible that a Steam Deck 2 will even appear with more battery power instead of the same – and also offer a variable refresh rate. Many people wanted this when the Steam Deck OLED launched and is one of the selling points for competing products like the Asus ROG Ally X.
This is what Valve thinks about the Steam Deck competition
In addition to their own product, the two designers also comment on the many competitors that have appeared in the past few months. In the interview you are not only calm, but even enthusiastic:
We want to let you play your Steam games wherever you are. The Steam Deck has made this easier, but the problem is not yet solved. We believe there is still a lot of room for improvement. Seeing that we’re not the only ones working on this is fantastic.
