Valve is working on a Steam Deck 2, but don’t expect it until 2028 or beyond. TechAvid says that this timeline proves that Valve prefers big performance and efficiency improvements to smaller, incremental ones. The company’s ambitions for balancing power and battery life in a portable gaming device are not met by existing hardware, especially in silicon technology, which is the main cause of the delay.
IGN asked Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais about Steam Deck 2, and he told them:
“We’re hard at work on it. 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.”
There isn’t a set release date for Steam Deck 2, but it seems like Valve plans to deliver the product eventually. In addition, according tothe remarks of Griffai from both this year as well as last year, performance will be the crucial issue Valve needs to resolve before Steam Deck 2 is released.
Patience will be very crucial for individuals who are eagerly waiting for the Steam Deck 2. The device is still in the beginning stages of development, according to Valve. Valve is going in a different direction than businesses that maintain market presence by releasing mid-cycle updates. Rather than just making small changes, the objective is to provide a genuine generational update that redefines mobile gaming. By using this approach, Valve hopes to differentiate itself in a crowded industry by producing a device that raises the bar for portable gaming experiences.
Last year Griffais said that:
“We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. 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.”
February 2022 saw the release of the Steam Deck portable, while November 2023 saw the release of the OLED variant. Even though there is a large selection of Steam Deck-verified games to play, certain contemporary PC games are difficult to run on Steam Deck, which has been around for more than four years. In fact, some were hoping for the next Steam Deck in time for the holidays last year when Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge in September 2023 that it would be at least a few years away.
When Steam Deck 2 is out, hopefully it will have a longer battery life. According to reviews on Steam Deck, battery life is a “massive problem” when using Windows. Even when using native SteamOS on the device, the “battery life still wasn’t great,”. This highlightes the fact that God of War on default settings consumed through a fully charged Steam Deck in just 90 minutes.
