Valve has said it’s “hard at work” on Steam Deck 2, while continuing to work on getting the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame out the door.
In November last year, when Valve announced its trio of new hardware devices, IGN asked Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais about Steam Deck 2, and he told us that Valve was “making sure… that it's a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product.”
Now, five months later, with Valve confirming a release date and price for Steam Controller, we thought we’d ask Griffais for an update on Steam Deck 2.
“We're hard at work on it,” he replied. “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.”
So, no firm release window on Steam Deck 2, but it sounds like Valve has every intention of releasing the device at some point. And, based on Griffais’ comments both now and last year, performance will be the key question Valve must answer before Steam Deck 2 becomes a reality.
“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,” Griffais told us last year. “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.”
The Steam Deck handheld launched in February 2022, with the OLED model coming out November 2023. Steam Deck is over four years old now, 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 last year.
Hopefully Steam Deck 2 will have improved battery life, when it eventually comes out. 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.
In the meantime, we’ve got plenty more on Steam Controller, including our review and our Valve interview in full.
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.
