Steam Deck is Future Proof, but Might Receive Future Iterations, Valve Says

The Steam Deck is, of course, not going to be as powerful as the most powerful PCs on the market right now, but for a handheld gaming PC, it’s got some pretty impressive specs. The thing with the PC space, however, is that there’s always new and better technologies popping up, which means it doesn’t take long for even the most powerful hardware to become outdate. So how’s the Steam Deck going to deal with that?

Speaking to IGN, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais reiterated that the Steam Deck is going to consistently meet its performance and resolution targets (Griffais has previously also said that the device can handle almost any game that might be thrown at it).

“Everything that’s been coming out this year [that we’ve tried] has been running without issues,” Griffais said. “I think this is largely a factor of industry trends. If people are still valuing high frame rates and high resolutions on different platforms, I think that content will scale down to our 800p, 30Hz target really well. If people start heavily favoring image quality, then we might be in a position where we might have trade offs, but we haven’t really seen that yet.”

Hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat added that in terms of future proofing, things are looking pretty good for it, partly thanks to its LPDDR5 memory. He said: “We’re using the LPDDR5, which is brand new to the industry. I think we might actually be one of the first products to showcase this new memory technology. So in that sense, that gives a lot of future proofing.”

Steam Deck designer Greg Coomer went on to say that is the device should prove to be successful (which Valve seems confident about), the company might even release future iterations of it. “We look at this as just a new category of device in the PC space,” Coomer said. “And assuming that customers agree with us that this is a good idea, we expect not only to follow up in the future with more iterations ourselves, but also for other manufacturers to want to participate in the space.”

Meanwhile, designer Lawrence Yang says that owing to the SteamOS3 being available for free, any and all manufacturers are going to be able to develop similar devices should they wish to. “We want to make sure people know that the SteamOS 3 is available free, for any manufacturer that wants to make a similar product,” Yang said.

The Steam Deck is going to launch in limited regions of the world in December this year, with more shipments to follow throughout 2022.