Valve shares fresh update on Steam Deck 2 plans following Steam Machine debut

Valve has just released a new set of hardware, and the Steam Machine is one of them. It's essentially Valve's answer to the home console segment of the market, but there's still no sight of the Steam Deck 2. The company, however, did offer some sort of update about the next-gen gaming handheld.

Pierre-Loup Griffais, a software engineer at Valve, shared in an interview with IGN that the company plans to offer an upgraded Steam Deck in the future. However, the release timeline is speculated to be later rather than sooner, and it's because of the current state of technology.

Griffais shared a similar statement to Valve's Lawrence Yang, who said the company is waiting for a generational leap in terms of both performance and efficiency. Looking back, Yang also told Reviews.org in 2024 that Valve isn't interested in doing a spec bump every year, and the company has stuck with that notion.

During the IGN interview, Griffais added that the team isn't looking for "20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life." Instead, Valve wants a "little bit more demarcated than that." Griffais did say that they have a "pretty good idea" of what the next version of Steam Deck will be, but notes that there's no offering in the SoC landscape that can match Valve's expectations.

Looking at the current landscape, there's no denying that gaming handhelds have had a leap in terms of performance. Offerings like the OneXFly Apex and GPD Win 5 are delivering RTX 4070 Laptop-grade GPU performance in a handheld form factor. But both rely on external batteries (100 W Anker 25K power bank curr. $91.99 on Amazon), something that Valve probably isn't a big fan of.