Valve had a big day today with the announcement of its second VR headset, the Valve Deckard, as well as a brand new Steam Machine and new Steam controller. What was conspicuously absent from today's news blitz was any mention of a Steam Deck successor, despite Steam Deck 2 rumors having been floated around for months. It turns out that's very much by design, as Valve needs more time to make sure there's enough of a performance leap to justify a whole new handheld.
"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," Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told IGN. "The thing we're making sure of is that it's a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product."
With the big kid on the block in the gaming handheld space being the ROG Xbox Ally X, which pretty handily beats out any current version of the Steam Deck in terms of performance, it makes sense for Valve to be planning a substantially more powerful handheld. What naturally worries me as someone with bills to pay is the Steam Deck 2's price. Xbox already opened the door to $1000 handhelds, so I'm hoping Valve at least has mercy on us and introduces lower-priced variants in addition to the flagship handheld.
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"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," said Griffais.
"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."
It's hard to believe the original Steam Deck launched way back in February 2022, but indeed, Valve's handheld is nearing its fourth birthday. It's natural for folks to eagerly await the first full-blown follow-up handheld, but it sounds like we'll be waiting some time for that. That said, with Valve saying it has a good idea of what the successor will be, it might be further along than you'd think.
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