Valve says no new Steam Deck every year, as it’s ‘not fair' for customers

If you’re hoping for a Steam Deck 2 or revamped version of Valve’s handheld every year, Valve says you really shouldn’t

Valve

If you’re hoping for a Steam Deck 2 or revamped version of Valve’s handheld every year, Valve says you really shouldn’t. Valve designers  Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat made the comments in a recent interview with Reviews.org and said that they want to wait until they can ship a proper generational evolution over the original Steam Deck.

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"It is important to us, and we've tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence," Yang said, referring to the usual cycle of annual hardware refreshes common in most branches of tech development. "We're not going to do a bump every year. There's no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that's kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that's only incrementally better.”

It’s an ironic thing to say considering Valve did, indeed, come out with a Steam Deck model that was only incrementally better – the Steam Deck OLED, which released a year after the Steam Deck with minimal improvements and a better screen. I guess that’s the last incremental update before the Steam Deck 2.

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“We really do want to wait for a generational leap in computing without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck,” Yang continued. “But it is something that we're excited about and we're working on.”

“Obviously we'd love to get even more performance in the same power envelope, but that technology doesn't exist yet," Aldehayyat said. "That's what I think we'd call a Steam Deck 2.0.”

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The Steam Deck can handle most modern games surprisingly well – even Dragon Age: The Veilguard is Steam Deck verified before launch – but performance improvements and, more importantly, better battery life would certainly be welcome. The Steam Deck’s launch and OLED models struggle to get more than 90 minutes of power for most AAA games, though your luck is slightly better with 2D and less demanding indie games.

Yang and Aldehayyat didn’t let slip when they think a Steam Deck 2 might be ready, though, so we’ll have to make do with that limited battery capacity for a while yet.