Don't hold your breath for the Steam Deck 2
As the OLED model launches in Australia, Valve says an upgrade isn't coming soon
Valve isn’t planning on releasing a new Steam Deck any time soon, judging by comments made by some of the company’s bigwigs.
“It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence,” Lawrence Yang told reviews.org as part of an interview to celebrate the release of the Steam Deck OLED in Australia.
And by yearly cadence, he means the annual upgrade cycle so many kinds of electronics fall into.
Yang is a designer at Valve, and part of the team that came up with the Steam Deck.
“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,” he said.
Early adopters of the Steam Deck might point out the current design was actually released in early 2022, and that the OLED version only provides a minor performance uplift. But Valve has been pretty consistent on its line on a Steam Deck upgrade since its early days.
“We really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on,” says Yang.
He doesn’t see the OLED version of the Steam Deck as a true next-generation model, but rather “what we wish we had shipped originally for Steam Deck.”
But when could that generational shift in performance arrive?
Recently we’ve seen Intel massively bump up the gaming power of some mainstream laptops with its second-generation Intel Ultra chipsets. But the Steam Deck uses an AMD processor, and as covered in a recent ETA Prime video, that new Intel hardware doesn’t really shine when limited to the power a Steam Deck runs at.
Steam Deck fans who have owned their handheld long enough to be hankering for an upgrade will be waiting a decent while longer for this one.
According to a recent post by The Verge, Valve does plan to let other handhelds use the SteamOS software that is part of what makes the Steam Deck special.
But Yang told the website the non-Steam-Deck version “isn’t ready to run out of the box yet.”