Valve announced three new devices today: Steam Frame, the new Steam Machine, and the new Steam Controller. But where’s the Steam Deck 2?
That’s a question we put to Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais in a new interview at the company’s office ahead of today’s big reveal. He replied to explain that Valve does indeed plan to release an upgraded version of its handheld at some point, but it’s waiting for the technology that would let it make a big enough performance jump to justify its existence while maintaining a reasonable battery life.
“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.”
Griffais’ comments might come as a disappointment to some given the capabilities of the aging Steam Deck. The handheld launched in February 2022, with the OLED model coming out November 2023. Steam Deck will soon be four years old, and while there is a long list of Steam Deck-verified games to play, it does struggle to run some modern PC games well. Indeed, in September 2023, Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that the next Steam Deck was at least a couple of years away, which had some hoping for the next version in time for the holidays this year. Clearly, that won’t happen.
Based on Griffais’ comments, the sticking point with a Steam Deck 2 is battery life, and you can see why. As IGN’s Steam Deck review points out, battery life is a “massive problem” while running Windows. Even when running the native SteamOS on the device, we noted “battery life still wasn’t great,” citing the fact that God of War on default settings chewed through a fully charged Steam Deck in just 90 minutes.
Still, there’s plenty more for Valve hardware fans to sink their teeth into. The aforementioned Steam Frame, and next-gen Steam Machine and Steam Controller are coming and we’ve got loads of exclusive content for them, which you can check out in our handy roundup. Meanwhile, here’s what we want to see from the Steam Deck 2.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
