Any time Valve announces something, people pay attention. Today, the company revealed the Steam Controller is launching soon. Like, super soon, as in next week.
Even more awesome Valve hardware is on the way down the line, including the Steam Frame VR headset and hugely anticipated Steam Machine PC/console hybrid. For me, though, I’m most excited to hear about advancements to the Steam Deck, which is one of my favorite pieces of tech ever made.
Unfortunately for myself and other Steam Deck enjoyers, it doesn’t sound like a sequel is coming any time soon. The OG Steam Deck launched in 2022 and the OLED version launched in 2023, but it sounds like a potential Steam Deck 2 is a long ways off, according to a new interview with Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais.
“We’re hard at work on it,” Griffais said to IGN. “And obviously every step of the way, if you look at our hardware projects over the years, you can draw a straight line from the original Steam Controller and Steam Machine to Steam Deck, to everything that we’re announcing and shipping this year. And we expect Steam Deck 2 will be a lot of the same where a lot of what we’re doing here will be learnings that build up to it.”
So, it’s been over four years since the original Steam Deck launched now, and it appears there’s no true concrete timing for when the next more advanced one will launch. That’s a bummer since the Steam Deck is far from a perfect machine, but I trust Valve, especially since Griffais says it’s largely due to tech advancements.
“We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50 percent more performance at the same battery life,” Griffais told us last year. “We want something a little bit more demarcated than that. So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, 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.”
Basically, Valve knows what the Steam Deck 2 (or whatever it’s called) looks like, but the technology it’s envisioning for it isn’t quite there yet. And that’s fine, because this is one project I’m willing to wait as long as it takes for.
