Since its launch about a year and a half ago, the Steam Deck has proven to be a massive success for Valve, and has been adopted fairly quickly (and widely) by the gaming audiences. Valve has, of course, previously said that it views Steam Deck as a “multi-generational product line”, and that it intends to release new and improved iterations of the hardware down the line. But will any of those iterations be coming anytime soon?
At least not within the next couple of years, according to Valve’s Pierre-Lou Griffais. Speaking recently with CNBC (via VGC), he said that Valve expects the performance levels that the Steam Deck is hitting with its current hardware to be “a stable target for a couple years.”
“Right now, we’re kind of looking at this performance target that we have as a stable target for a couple years,” he said. “We think that it’s a pretty sweet spot in terms of being able to play all the experiences from this new generation and so far, the new releases are coming out with great experiences on Steam Deck.
“Obviously, we’re working with developers on future releases and we’re monitoring the feedback there but so far, I think it has been pretty good on the horsepower front.”
He also said while speaking with The Verge that having clear and straightforward for developers and consumers alike when it comes to the Steam Deck’s specs and capabilities is an important part of Valve’s strategy for the device, and that as such, you shouldn’t expect a next-gen version of the portable device in the near future.
“It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple, where every Deck can play the same games,” Griffais said. “As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be had. We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life. I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years, but we’re still closely monitoring innovations in architectures and fabrication processes to see where things are going there. ”
Valve has, of course, said in the past that it’s continued development on Steam Deck since its launch with a view to releasing improved and more powerful versions down the line, and though it doesn’t seem like an upgrade will be coming just yet, it should be interesting to see exactly what it improves once it does arrive. Who knows, perhaps it’ll launch with an OLED screen as well.
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