Valve Gives Update on Steam Deck 2 Release

Valve released the Steam Deck at the start of the 2022. While the handheld Valve machine has not challenged Nintendo’s complete and utter dominance of the handheld market, it has proven to be a success for Valve. And you would expect Valve to build upon this success, but it sounds like it is in no rush to get a Steam Deck 2 out.

According to Valve designer Lawrence Yang, Valve is not going to release the Steam Deck 2 just to release something that is a slight improvement to the current Steam Deck in the name of simply getting another piece of hardware on the market. Rather, Valve is — according to Yang — prepared to wait until a proper generational leap is available; only then will the Steam Deck 2 release. Right now, this is not possible with the Steam Deck 2, hence why a successor isn’t currently out, but this could change over time.

“It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence,” said Yang speaking to Reviews. “We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.”

Yang says Valve is “working on” the second generation of the Steam Deck, but it is unclear in what capacity. It sounds like the tech isn’t there right now, so it is presumably more in a conceptual and prototyping capacity. However, this is not exactly clear. Whatever the case, it doesn’t sound like the Steam Deck 2 is on the horizon. While it isn’t on the horizon though, it is something Valve is clearly committed to releasing. In other words it’s not a matter of if with the Steam Deck 2, but when.

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