The Steam Deck has been a big success for Valve, and the company has made it clear on multiple occasions in the past that it intends to develop more iterations of the portable device in the future. But though it’s inevitable that we will see a Steam Deck 2 at some point, it also doesn’t seem like that’s going to be anytime soon.
Speaking recently with Reviews.org, Valve designer Lawrence Yang stressed that the company doesn’t intend to release iterations of the Steam Deck on an annual basis, and stated that there likely won’t be Steam Deck 2 unless there’s reason for it to exist and it’s an actual “generational leap”.
“It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence,” Yang said. “We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard similar statements from Valve. Last year, designer Jay Shaw stated that the company was “thinking about Steam Deck 2 at all times”, but that it was “going to wait for the technology to present itself in a way that we find interesting and for the team to really want to make that leap”.
Prior to that, Valve’s Pierre-Lou Griffais suggested that it would be at least “a couple of years” before the company decided to release Steam Deck 2.