While Valve unveiled a new slate of hardware earlier this week, the company isn’t quite ready to release a successor to the Steam Deck just yet. In an interview with IGN about its recent announcements, Valve’s software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke about how the success of the Steam Deck paved the way for devices like the Steam Machine. However, he also reiterated the company’s previous statements about not wanting simple performance jumps with iterative hardware releases.
Rather, Valve is more interested in larger improvements made with silicon, as well as improvements made to hardware architecture. Through this, the company currently has a “good idea” of what the successor to the Steam Deck looks like. Unfortunately, however, nothing available in the current market meets the expectations that the company has for this potential successor.
“Obviously the Steam Deck’s not our focus today, but the same things we’ve said in the past where we’re really interested to work on what’s next for Steam Deck… the thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product,” said Griffais when asked about a potential Steam Deck upgrade.
“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.“
When it comes to the Steam Machine, Griffais also brings up the upcoming PC’s parallels with the Steam Deck, since the two offer a base level of hardware that can then be targeted by game developers. He spoke about the fact that this reduces hardware variance for developers will end up being one of the strengths of the Steam Machine. It also helps that Valve announced that it will be expanding its Steam Deck Verified processes to also include Steam Machine in compatibility ratings for games.
“And so just like Steam Deck, every single Steam Deck has the same level of performance and can run all the games on Steam and all the games that are Steam Deck verified, it was really important to us that even just the initial process of figuring out a Steam Machine is a product for you wasn’t already laced in a bunch of different choices based on what games you have to leave behind or other choices like that,” Griffais explained.
“So I think the unified performance spec is actually a strength of the product offering there. And similarly, we expect that’s going to have good side effects when developers are doing that work that we mentioned to tune the graphical settings, because they’ll be able to just focus on one spec.”
For more details about the Steam Machine, check out our coverage of its announcement. Also check out Valve’s plans to ensure better hardware availability, as well as the fact that it isn’t working on a first-party game to showcase the Steam Frame VR headset.
