In a new post on the Steamworks Development blog, Valve has written about all of he things the company accomplished during the previous year. Among the celebration of various new features for Steam as a platform, the company also spoke about its hardware and software business.
Going by the post, Valve sees the future for its hardware like the Steam Deck, along with software like SteamVR abd the Linux-based SteamOS is bright. This comes off a year of development where Valve focused quite a bit on SteamOS in its efforts to make the operating system platform agnostic.
Valve’s investments into Linux have also been paying off in large part thanks to its contributions to the Proton software compatibility layer. For context, Proton is what allows games developed primarily for Windows to run on Linux. Thanks to this, developers don’t have to go out of their way to have their games be playable on Linux, and by extension, SteamOS and the Steam Deck.
According to the post, the Deck Compatibility program has ranked around 17,000 games throughout Steam as either “Playable” or “Verified” for the Steam Deck. The handheld gaming system has also been quite successful, with around 330 million hours of playtime on Steam throughout 2024 being attributed to the Steam Deck.
“The future of hardware at Valve is bright. Steam Deck, SteamOS and SteamVR are delivering tons of value to players and devs, built on top of a decade of investments into UI, linux compatibility, input support, custom silicon, motion tracking, displays, battery efficiency, and more,” wrote Valve.
“Every developer making PC games benefits from these investments, and players can now enjoy their PC games in so many new contexts. Hardware teams at Valve are delighted to see Steam in the living room, the airport, the backyard, and wherever else customers want to bring their library of PC games.”
Valve’s efforts at spinning off SteamOS as a hardware-agnostic operating system has also been paying off. Earlier this year, it revealed its collaboration with Lenovo to release some versions of the Lenovo Legion Go S that would be running on SteamOS.
Even with all of this success over the last year, Valve has previously been adamant that it is in no hurry to rush out a follow-up machine to the Steam Deck. The most recent instance of this came about in January. Shortly after AMD unveiled its new processors, some of which would benefit the handheld gaming PC form factor, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais dispelled any potential rumours of a new Steam Deck that uses AMD’s new Z2 chip.
“There is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck,” posted Griffais on social media at the time. “Guessing the slide was meant to say the series is meant for products like that, not announcing anything specific.”
Back in October, Valve designer Lawrence Yang also spoke about the company’s intentions to not replace the Steam Deck with a newer model. Yang said that there were no plans of a yearly iterative release of the Steam Deck, and that the only way a Steam Deck 2 would come into existence would be if there were a reason for it to be made, which largely comes down to it needing a “generational leap” in performance and battery life.
