You don’t need to worry about the Steam Deck being replaced by a better model as soon as you buy one, according to the handheld PC’s creator. Valve says it won’t be releasing yearly hardware updates, instead waiting until it can deliver a true technological leap forward before launching the next version of the Steam Deck.
“We are not doing the yearly cadence," Valve designer Lawrence Yang gold Reviews.org. "We're not going to do a bump every year. There's no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that's not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that's only incrementally better.”
Console makers are nowhere near as guilty as other tech companies — notably Apple — of pushing new hardware out the door too early. As opposed to new iPhones hitting the market every single year, truly new consoles only come around once every five years or more, with a few smaller updates along the way. For instance, the Nintendo Switch Lite launched two years after the original Switch, with the Switch OLED coming two years after that. Even smaller upgrades can come throughout a console’s life that replace the original hardware rather than being released as a separate console, like the 2023 PS5 Slim.
Valve says not to expect regular updates of either type for the Steam Deck, but that doesn’t mean Valve is against releasing any new versions of the hardware before the Steam Deck 2. In 2023, Valve designer Pierre-Loup Griffais essentially shot down the idea of a Steam Deck with an OLED screen, only for the Steam Deck OLED to actually launch in 2024.
What we aren’t likely to see are smaller upgrades on the level of the PS5 Slim, or slight changes to the handheld’s internals that wouldn’t warrant a new name or much attention at all. When it comes time for a Steam Deck with more processing power or a much-needed upgrade to battery life, those will arrive in the Steam Deck 2 rather than a replacement for the current model.
Previously, Valve has said that the reason for the Steam Deck’s anticipated slower upgrade cadence is that it’s simply not possible.
"Obviously we'd love to get even more performance in the same power envelope, but that technology doesn't exist yet," hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat told Eurogamer. "That's what I think we'd call a Steam Deck 2.0.”
Yang also offers a slight hint of what we can expect whenever the Steam Deck 2 does show up.
“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,” he told Reviews.org. “But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.”
We already knew that work was underway at Valve on the next generation of Steam Deck, and Yang’s comment confirms that the company is working on ways to deliver more power without making it even more of a battery drain. It would be easy to assume that would be a priority for the next version of the handheld, but hearing the official word on the matter is always reassuring.
So if you were afraid of buying a Steam Deck only to have it replaced with a shinier model, have no fear. And if you were waiting for that mid-generation refresh, sorry about your luck. At least we now know what to expect from future iterations of the Steam Deck — and what not to.
