Valve has provided a new update on the Steam Deck 2 in the wake of revealing its new Steam Machine platform. Over the past few years, those at Valve have made it no secret that a successor to the Steam Deck will one day arrive. What has remained in question, though, is when this second iteration of the Steam Deck might actually release and how it would improve upon the current hardware. Now, we finally have more answers on this front directly from Valve.
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In a discussion with members of the press today (via IGN), Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke briefly about the company’s ongoing pursuit of creating a new iteration of the Steam Deck. Griffais said that Valve is currently still waiting for technology to reach a point where the Steam Deck 2 would represent a large leap between handhelds and not just a moderate one. Still, Griffais said that Valve tends to already “have a pretty good idea of what” the Steam Deck 2 will end up looking like, but it can’t yet create the platform until tech catches up with its ideas.
“The thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product,” Griffais said. “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.”
In short, this response from Griffais suggests that the Steam Deck 2 won’t launch in 2026 for certain. An arrival in 2027 at the absolute earliest seems more feasible, as this would represent a gap of five years between the original Steam Deck and its follow-up. Still, this could be wishful thinking, which might lead to the Steam Deck 2 not dropping until 2028 or beyond.
In the interim, Valve isn’t slowing down on the hardware front, as it announced today it will be releasing the Steam Machine, a new VR headset dubbed the Steam Frame, and a revamped Steam Controller next year. Meanwhile, additional rumors and reports from this year suggest that a new Half-Life game is in the works that could end up being that of Half-Life 3.
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