Valve surprised us with the announcement of not one, but three new products in the form of the Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and its second generation Steam Controller. Naturally, the question of “But why no Steam Deck 2?” came up, and according to the company, it’s still waiting for better, more significant and powerful hardware to be made, before it even makes them.
In an interview with IGN, Pierre-Loup Griffais, Valve’s software engineer, explained that the company is indeed planning on making a follow-up to its gaming handheld, but in order for it to do that, the technology has to make a “big enough performance jump”, while maintaining a reasonable battery life to justify its existence.
“Obviously, the Steam Deck’s not our focus today, but the same things we’ve said in the past where we’re really interested to work on what’s next for Steam Deck… the thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product,” Griffais explained.
“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.”
The Steam Deck is, at this point, already getting a bit long in the tooth. Announced in 2021, the gaming handheld runs on a semi-custom chip, featuring Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 graphics cores. And while it raised excitement amongst gamers that yearned for a gaming handheld capable of bringing their entire Steam library on the go, it opened the gates up for other brands like ASUS and MSI, and quickly got overshadowed by more powerful hardware like AMD’s Ryzen Z1 Series APUs.
(Source: IGN)
