Valve Confirms Steam Deck 2 Development, No Release Date Yet
▼ Summary
– Valve is actively developing Steam Deck 2 but has not announced a release date.
– The company wants a “worthwhile” performance upgrade of more than 50% before releasing a successor.
– Valve views Steam Deck 2 as a continuation of its hardware evolution from Steam Machine and Steam Controller.
– Current chip offerings do not yet meet Valve’s performance targets for a true next-gen Steam Deck.
– Battery life remains a key issue, with the current Steam Deck lasting only 90 minutes on demanding games like God of War.
Valve has confirmed it is actively working on Steam Deck 2, though the company remains tight-lipped about a potential release window. The update comes as the studio continues to push forward with other hardware projects, including the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and the Steam Frame.
Back in November, when Valve unveiled its latest trio of devices, IGN spoke with programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais about the next-generation handheld. At the time, he emphasized that any successor would need to deliver a “worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product.” Five months later, with the Steam Controller now officially priced and dated, we circled back to Griffais for a progress report.
“We’re hard at work on it,” he told us. “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.”
While no firm timeline has been set, Griffais’ comments make clear that Valve is committed to releasing a true successor. The key hurdle remains performance. Last year, he laid out a clear benchmark: “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. 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 landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.”
The original Steam Deck launched in February 2022, followed by the OLED model in November 2023. That means the device is now over four years old. While it boasts a long list of verified games, it has begun to struggle with some modern PC titles. In September 2023, Griffais told The Verge that the next Steam Deck was at least a couple of years away, leading some to hope for a holiday 2025 launch. That timeline has now passed without a new model.
When Steam Deck 2 does arrive, battery life will likely be a major focus. IGN’s original review flagged battery life as a “massive problem” when running Windows, and even on the native SteamOS, performance was less than stellar. For example, God of War on default settings drained a fully charged Steam Deck in just 90 minutes.
In the meantime, Valve has plenty else to keep fans busy, including the newly detailed Steam Controller, which we’ve reviewed in full.
(Source: IGN)
