Folks holding out for a Steam Deck 2 may be waiting for a bit as Valve reiterates that it has no plans for one anytime soon. The news comes from Valve coder Pierre-Loup Griffais while attending the Tokyo Game Show 2023. This is not the first time that Valve employees have said something similar. Steam Deck designers previously stated in December 2022 that Valve is more focused on optimizations and updates for the current deck than introducing a follow-up. One of those same designers reinforced those statements again earlier this spring. Meanwhile, Valve reiterates that it has no plans, once again, for a new model anytime soon.
Official quote (via The Verge):
“It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple, where every Deck can play the same games. As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be had. We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life. I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years, but we’re still closely monitoring innovations in architectures and fabrication processes to see where things are going there.”
Performance target:
Pierre-Loup Griffais added in an interview on CNBC, “We’re looking at this performance target that we have as a stable target for a couple years.”
Even as the handheld gaming segment continues to grow with competitors in multiple markets it appears that Valve’s primary concern for a new model is its performance target. Something common to nearly all, except the Nintendo Switch and some indie projects using Intel CPUs, is an AMD APU. AMD does have newer APUs with improved performance that competitors are using but apparently, these newer processors do not provide enough gains to justify a new model, yet.