Valve Steam Deck designers discuss possibility of releasing new hardware in new interview

The world of gaming handhelds moves quickly for almost all manufacturers. Arguably, Anbernic has now become the most prolific of the bunch thanks to its monthly release cycle. Incidentally, Anbernic has recently presented the RG CubeXX as a cheaper alternative to the RG Cube (curr. $234.98 on Amazon), details of which we have covered separately.

Conversely, Valve has released two gaming handhelds so far, albeit based on the same overall underlying first-generation hardware. However, Steam Deck Designers Lawrence Yang and Jay Sha have now shed new light on prospective second-generation models in an interview with Press Start Australia. Please note that Yang and Sha have not explicitly ruled in Valve releasing a so-called Steam Deck 2.

Instead, they referred to more nebulous ideas of 'future generations' of hardware. To that end, Yang adds that Valve will 'take the learnings' from the current Steam Deck as inspiration for 'new hardware'. Regardless of the actual device, it seems that Valve has new consumer-grade hardware in the works. For reference, the key quote in question is as follows:

We're working on future generations of this. Steam Deck is kind of the culmination of everything we learned making hardware up to that point with Steam Controller, Steam Machines, Valve Index and Steam Link. And so we took all of those things that we learned and said, OK, here's Steam Deck as one package. And in the same token, we're going to take the learnings we have from Steam Deck and move it forward to future new hardware as well. So we have things that we're not talking about today.