Steam Deck fans who are holding out for a revision with more powerful hardware may just want to go ahead and place an order for the current one, as it doesn’t sound like a faster version is coming out anytime soon. Speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun in a feature that was authored to celebrate the handheld PC’s first anniversary and how the community is blowing Valve’s minds, Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang revealed that there will be a bit of a wait until its successor surfaces, stating that “a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn’t be for a few years.” It’s unclear how much more powerful the Steam Deck 2 might be, but the current model already offers comprehensive support for what appears to be nearly 3,000 verified games, with recent additions being Hogwarts Legacy, Dead Space, and Cyberpunk 2077.
From a Rock, Paper, Shotgun report:
[…] the Steam Deck’s first year in the wild has shown it really is much more of a PC than a console. It hasn’t been simply released and left to do its job as a shifter of more profitable software – it’s been repeatedly, almost constantly updated and improved, with plenty of opportunities for customisation and personalisation emerging though its own users as much as its creators. Would it benefit from more development help in the future? Sure, but there’s no question of it receiving that, whether or not it comes with a focus shift from ‘things the Steam Deck can do’ to a more specific ‘things games can do on a Steam Deck’, like HDR and ray tracing.
Either way, it’s had an auspicious 12 months by any reasonable metric, and just in case you were wondering, it isn’t in danger of getting dumped and replaced by a new model either. While the Steam Deck’s success has “has made us even more excited to look closely at what can be improved”, according to Yang, he reckons “a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn’t be for a few years.”