Don’t expect a Steam Deck 2 any time soon — or at least, not within the year. While Valve has confirmed that it’s working on an official follow-up to its popular handheld console, it’s against the idea of annual hardware releases.
In an interview with Reviews.org (spotted by The Verge), Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat weighed in on the product’s future. While they said they approve of competition in the space and how they can (and in some cases have) improve on the Steam Deck foundation, they’re not going to follow the trend of releasing new versions with incremental improvements.
“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,” Yang said. He added that the team is waiting for a “generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life” before it launches a proper Steam Deck 2.
That isn’t to say that Valve doesn’t want to improve on the Steam Deck in the future. Aldehayyat says that the Steam Deck is addressing a problem that players want to solve, but it’s not perfect.
“We really want to be able to let you play your Steam games anywhere you want. Steam Deck has improved that significantly, but we don’t view it as a solved problem yet. We still think that there’s a lot of room for improvement,” Aldehayyat said.
Other Steam Deck team members have commented on when they think a second-generation handheld could hit the market. In September 2023, Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais echoed that the company wants to upgrade, but is waiting for that generational leap. As such, Griffais estimated a Deck 2 could launch in late 2025, maybe 2026.
“It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple, where every Deck can play the same games. As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be had,” Griffais said.
We suppose it’s possible there could be another mid-gen release like the Steam Deck OLED, but Valve hasn’t made any mention of it. The OLED model didn’t offer many improvements, but it upgraded the screen from LCD to OLED and slightly improved battery life.