While the ongoing RAM crisis is preventing the Steam Machine and Frame’s arrival, the new Steam Controller is launching next week, and we think it’s pretty sweet, albeit a bit niche still. What about a potential Steam Deck 2 though? Is Valve working on that already?
Well, IGN has been trying to learn about it for a while now, with Valve saying it had a “pretty good idea” of what a new version might be late last year. Five months on from that previous tidbit, the site asked Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais again about the company’s next handheld PC. Long story short: It’s coming, but not happening anytime soon.
His full quotes paint a clearer picture of what Valve is looking for, thankfully: “We’re hard at work on it… And obviously every step of the way, if you look at our hardware projects over the years, you can draw a straight line from the original Steam Controller and Steam Machine to Steam Deck, to everything that we’re announcing and shipping this year. And we expect Steam Deck 2 will be a lot of the same where a lot of what we’re doing here will be learnings that build up to it.”
If we look at the new Steam Controller, it’s easy to see how the Deck’s success (as well as its shortcomings) have impacted its design and functionalities. Moreover, parts of Valve’s original controller still live in those pieces of hardware, so the company’s approach has been heavily iterative. Therefore, there’s no reason to believe Steam Deck 2 will be a huge departure from what it’s been done in the past.
That said, Griffais also stated they’re looking to make “something a little bit more demarcated” than a new handheld with extra performance gains over the current model: “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 Deck’s arrival kickstarted a rush of similar handheld PCs from other companies, with most of them offering little-to-no substantial increases when it comes to performance and fidelity on a portable format. If Valve is looking to lead the pack again and wow in a post-Switch 2 world – a slimmer piece of hardware that can punch above its weight thanks to DLSS – we’ll likely have to wait for it.
