Today, Valve announced that it’s introducing a new product in its incredibly successful Steam Deck lineup. The new OLED version of the Deck launches later this month and will provide a substantial fidelity boost for players who elect to upgrade. That said, many players are still wondering when Valve will drop a true successor to the Steam Deck. After all, several other manufacturers have been releasing new consoles over the last few years, giving Valve quite a bit of competition. Unfortunately for those players, it sounds like you’ll be waiting at least a little bit longer until a Steam Deck 2 comes down the line.
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When Is The Steam Deck 2 Launching?
In an interview with IGN, Steam Deck designer Jay Shaw was asked about how long players would be waiting for a successor. He said, “I don’t know. It’ll be a while. I think it’ll be quite a while. We don’t have any kind of set date. I think we’re going to wait for the technology to present itself in a way that we find interesting and for the team to really want to make that leap. We’re very, very, very proud of this version of Steam Deck and this is it. This is the one that we’re the most happy with and we think customers will be too. So we’re thinking about Steam Deck 2 at all times, but I think we’re so satisfied here that this is really the kind of high end of what we wanted to do.”
During his interview with Polygon, hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat’s answer was similar, saying, “Although Steam Deck is super successful, it’s still very early for handheld gaming. There’s still a lot of work to be done. We don’t see ourselves as achieving all of our goals any time soon. There are multiple years ahead of us.”
As you can see, we probably won’t be hearing about the Steam Deck 2 for at least a few more years. However, it is worth noting that Valve is taking notice of all of its competitors entering the fray. In his Polygon interview, Aldehayyat said “We love that. We’d love for more companies to make some,” showing that the team welcomes the competition. Of course, internally they might wish they were the only game in town, but there’s also something to be said about having a competitor to push you.
Either way, the Steam Deck OLED will provide a substantial visual update if you’ve been waiting. We’ve seen Nintendo take this same path with the Switch to great effect. The Steam Deck OLED model will have two versions available, a 512GB model for $549 and a 1TB model for $649. Both will start to ship to buyers on November 16 with pre-orders starting soon.
