I love my Steam Deck, as any regular reader will know. It's my favourite gaming device but it could always be better right? And with competition hot (hi Nintendo), I hope Valve have more plans.
Now, I'm not dumb enough to think that the Steam Deck is in actual competition with the Nintendo Switch. That's just not a reality. The Switch has sold over 140 million units and continues to sell millions, it's in stores everywhere, people buy it for their children, for themselves and yeah — you get the idea. But still, for us PC fans the Steam Deck (and specifically us Linux lot) and other PC handhelds are simply awesome.
We all knew a Nintendo Switch 2 would happen, there just hadn't been any real proper confirmation, until now. Writing on social media, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa posted on May 7th:
This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.
So sometime before the end of March 2025, the Nintendo Switch 2 will be revealed.
That leads me to think about the future. The Switch 2 will no doubt sell by the truck-loads once again. So let's just set that aside because it's a different market overall. Still, we have other handheld PC gaming vendors appearing often like the ROG Ally, Legion GO, MSI Claw, various devices from OneXPlayer, GPD, Ayaneo and more on the way so there's really a lot of these devices now.
To me, handheld gaming like this is the future. You may think I am heavily biased, and in many ways I am (obviously, I run this website) but I'm a tech-fan. I have a PlayStation, a Switch, an Xbox and more. But it feels increasingly weird to have a dedicated solid box permanently attached to a single TV. I actually don't like that at all now. Being able to take a much smaller device with you to play anywhere, and additionally have the ability to hook it up to a TV whenever you want just feels so much better. Nintendo definitely had the right idea, as did Valve.
We've seen in the past that Valve have said pretty clearly they had plans to keep going, and with the Steam Deck still continuing to sell constantly, it would be crazy if Valve didn't produce a Steam Deck 2. Even though you could argue the Steam Deck OLED is such a ridiculous improvement it might as well be a Steam Deck 2, I want more. A lot more.
The current shell design is just fine, I don't think Valve really need to do many changes there at all. The OLED design gave us enough improvements inside to various parts so thinking on what they should add in for the big number 2: a newer generation AMD APU to bring performance up, with a slightly higher resolution screen and I honestly think I would be ridiculously happy. It doesn't take much. Performance being the biggest one and with more new AMD chips on the way, give it another year for the generation after that (or their refresh) and we could be looking at a really fun performance boost.
So, let's say a Steam Deck 2 announcement in late 2026. Make it so, Valve.
What do you think? And what do you now want from a Steam Deck 2?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
What I think should be included is improved APU, memory, and screen, VRR, and just more anti-cheat compatibility.
Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: grigiWhat do you think is a good cadence for updates? 3 years? 4 years? more?It's far too long, the Switch was low-powered even at release and it has missed a fair amount of games as it's just not strong enough.
The 8 year cadence of the switch is too long as it has definitely been losing developer interest in the last two years as it's too weak to support on multiplatform releases anymore.
For the Deck 2, my suggestion there about announcing it late 2026, would mean a release in 2027. Making it about 5 years between Deck and Deck 2 which for a PC platform seems pretty darn reasonable to me, considering the Deck struggles a lot with newer games right now.
These games are not optimized thought and most of these engines are not even multithreaded, and we have a bandwidth issue not a TFLOPS or GFLOPS one.
Quoting: ShmerlWhy? Desktop generation of CPUs and GPUs refresh around once per 2 years. Same happens with mobile phones. Why can't gaming handhelds refresh that way too?
2 year refreshes may make more sense for the alternative PC handhelds such as the ROG Ally, and Legion go, which aren't targeted as a standard in terms of games having settings and such tailored for it, but for the Steam Deck that makes no sense, since it detracts from the "Deck Verified" system, as well as the seemingly intented purpose for the device to be the standard "lowest common denominator" target for developers to make sure their games are ready to be supported for handheld gaming PC's. A longer cycle makes more sense for a standard to work as a...standard, which would apply to a new device which would be intended to replace what was the standard target, with a new one.
Last edited by R3BiRtH on 8 May 2024 at 7:26 pm UTC
Quoting: R3BiRtH2 year refreshes may make more sense for the alternative PC handhelds such as the ROG Ally, and Legion go, which aren't targeted as a standard in terms of games having settings and such tailored for it, but for the Steam Deck that makes no sense, since it detracts from the "Deck Verified" system, as well as the seemingly intented purpose for the device to be the standard "lowest common denominator" target for developers to make sure their games are ready to be supported for handheld gaming PC's. A longer cycle makes more sense for a standard to work as a...standard, which would apply to a new device which would be intended to replace what was the standard target, with a new one.
I don't necessarily view "lowest common denominator" as something good, since it can hold back games progress and not everyone cares to make their games scalable to be able to address it properly.
2 might be tight, but 5+ or 7+ years of the incumbent consoles is too long.
There is such issue as consolization of games that causes them to be limited unnecessarily due to console hardware being way behind current hardware capabilities.
Last edited by Shmerl on 8 May 2024 at 10:43 pm UTC
chickenb00 May 8
I have little faith that eGPU would be well-implemented for a Linux device, even by Valve. And the expense -- those things are not cheap, and you would still be bound by the CPU in the deck itself. If that's upgraded to a 6/12 it would be better, but anyone with a Radeon 7800+ would be losing performance, and then you'd have people whining if they can't use their Nvidia cards.
It's simply too big an ask.
I haven't kept up much with AMD's big.LITTLE cpu design, but imagine a Steam Deck with power sipping little cores that give crazy good battery life for low end games and BIG cores for latest AAA titles. Add some controls to the power profile feature of SteamOS to customize power and performance of the big and LITTLE cores would be a huge win. The big cores can be prioritized when plugged-in/docked or when the user isn't really concerned about battery life. If I remember correctly, the AMD big.LITTLE compute unit also had the ability to determine the work load size and assign the work to either big or little cores. A hybrid big or little mode might be all you need.
I think a console would be great. I dock my Steam Deck all the time. But I still want a power house for under the TV. Plus, I'm big on, "right tool for the right job". Not to say that the Steam Deck shouldn't be docked, but I think if there were a dedicated Steam console, then less people would think of their Steam Decks as aging. When folks dock their Steam Deck 1/2, they would have different expectations/wishes. Right now my Steam Deck plays all my games way better than I ever hoped for when I first heard about the Steam Deck. I mean, playing HD2 and DiableIV on my Steam Deck??? Shut the front door, I would of thought you were getting ready to sell me snake oil. I can and will build my own Steam Console but, I'm thinking for the people who aren't going to want to build their own custom gaming rig or really know how, nor want to learn. I mean, the Steam Deck 2 is going to be leaps ahead of the Steam Deck. But a Steam Console could be designed and use hardware that is purpose built for high FPS and higher resolutions.
Around 2026 or 2027, I'm sure the big.LITTLE AMD architecture will have gone through a few iterations.
Last edited by Highball on 8 May 2024 at 11:16 pm UTC
slaapliedje May 8
Quoting: ShmerlWell, modern consoles and past consoles are completely a different ball game. These days, with the exception of Nintendo, they just take an AMD built system, throw it into a case and slap an OS on them. Nintendo did basically the same with an nvidia ARM SoC, but had a tablet with detachable controllers, just makes it ARM vs x86. But the previous consoles actually required a lot of R&D. So a 4-6 year cycle made a lot more sense. Consoles also, in a lot of ways, could surpass ease of use and stability over a computer. Not to mention cost of gaming hardware in the early 90s for a computer vs say the Genesis / SNES was huge. Even the 'cheap' gaming computers were ~500 vs the consoles (which were 100-150).Quoting: slaapliedjeIf the latter group, it should realistically have a similar cadence of release as the console market does.
There definitely is a difference in thought processes between the people who game on computers, and those who use gaming consoles.
I've always seen that console refresh cadence as indication of lack of competition. Imagine desktop GPU and CPU makers would have a monopoly. I highly doubt they'll invest so much money in refreshing hardware as they do now. Same applies to mobile market. They'll try to market their slow progress as "it's good enough" to make that the user's expectation.
So if console market would have been more competitive, we also would have seen refresh cycles being much shorter. At least that's what I think is the real reason.
I.e. that whole "console expectation" is a marketing construct, not something inherently defined.
Consoles at this point, are likely to die off... They actually are needing those shorter refresh cycles (hence the PS4 Pro and upcoming PS5 Pro, or even the Switch OLED). Games are just coming out for them that won't run at even 60fps, let alone the 144fps that a lot of TVs have now. I think both Sony and Microsoft see the writing on the wall, and are possibly planning on just killing off the consoles in the next decade...
Then again, I've also been seeing a lot about a video game crash happening soon, because much like the one in the 80s, there are just a bunch of games coming out that are trash, too expensive and trash, or just DLC you to death.
Time to fire up those Amigas, Atari STs or DOS systems and play the loads of games that released for them that you never had time to get to! Or even the loads of new games that have been coming out for them!
TL;DR, I'm keeping my money from Nintendo.
Kimyrielle May 8
Unlike Liam, I don't necessarily see the future of gaming in mobile. Maybe I am a dinosaur, but for me, gaming always was, is and always will be desktop. The Steam Deck is for the casual 30 mins of Stardew Valley in bed or when out in the yard. My lifestyle is thankfully not very mobile (I would hate being away all the time), so the desktop serves me just fine for most gaming. The Deck will always be my supplementary device, and it does a superb job doing that.
Do we actually know how many Steam Deck units were sold so far?
UnixOutlaw May 9
Meanwhile in Australia.... (crickets)
Quoting: Penglingthese figures from 2016 painting a rather sad picture, along with a note that by 2014, tablets accounted for 40% of the home-computing market.
I don't know if there are newer stats available, but anecdotally I think tablet use peaked around then, and has declined a lot since.
Edit: here's some recent browser stats, which have it at around 2%
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet
I didn't look exhaustively, but I think it peaked at less than 7%
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/2014
And was already on the decline when mobile overtook desktop
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/2016
Last edited by Phlebiac on 9 May 2024 at 5:19 am UTC
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