In a recent interview, Valve made it clear that they wouldn't bring out a new Steam Deck until they could offer significant improvements.
In a recent interview with reviews.org, two of Valve's designers, Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldenhayyat, explained that Valve won’t release a new Steam Deck each year.
Discussing the trend of yearly hardware refreshes, they said, that it was important to them to not follow the rest of the industry in this practice, which they see as anti-consumer:
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 explained that they want to wait for a huge leap in computing, without sacrificing battery life, before announcing the second Steam Deck generation. But they’re working hard on exactly that.
Valve have been talking about the development of Steam Deck 2 since the release of the original in North America and Europe, but they don't believe the technology has moved forward enough to justify it yet:
The first Steam Deck was the first moment in time where we felt like there was enough GPU performance in a portable form factor that lets you play all your Steam games. We would love for the trend of perf-per-watt to progress rapidly to do that, but it's not quite there yet.
Until performance-per-watt can increase significantly, we won't be getting a second generation of the Steam Deck.
Are you a fan of Valve's approach to the Steam Deck?
