Valve have plans for the Steam Deck 2, plus a brief Steam Machine / Steam Frame update

The good news is that the Steam Deck 2 is still firmly within Valve's plans, the bad news is that there's no date for it yet. As expected really, Valve aren't going to be giving any truly firm details on a Steam Deck 2 yet, especially while they're still struggling to get the Steam Machine and Steam Frame out the door.

Speaking to IGN, one of the many who had pre-release access to the new Steam Controller, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais gave an update on the status of the Steam Deck 2:

“We're hard at work on it,” he replied. “And obviously every step of the way, if you look at our hardware projects over the years, you can draw a straight line from the original Steam Controller and Steam Machine to Steam Deck, to everything that we're announcing and shipping this year. And we expect Steam Deck 2 will be a lot of the same where a lot of what we're doing here will be learnings that build up to it.”

“We're not interested in getting to a point where it's 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life,” Griffais told us last year. “We want something a little bit more demarcated than that. So we've been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there's no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.”

Quite a similar answer to what they've given before, but it's great to know that they are still working on it and have a "pretty good" idea of what it will be now.

I agree with what Griffais is saying on the hardware. There simply aren't chips good enough right now to justify a truly next-generation Steam Deck to give a decent enough performance boost with good battery life. We're probably still another 2 years away from that yet. Hopefully by then all the AI component pricing drama will have calmed down too.

With the full IGN interview, Valve also gave a brief update on the Steam Machine and Steam Frame. Griffais mentioned

"Yeah, we don't have exact details about the timeline to share today. And we're hard at work on trying to get them out the door. I think we are definitely expecting to roll out some news soon about that, but in general, I think things are going well.

The Steam Controller definitely is a building block for something like the Steam Machine, the experience of the Steam Machine is going to, especially for things like Steam Machine verified and the out-of-box process definitely is a more seamless experience with a Steam controller. But we definitely expect that the controller is also a product that stands on its own, that's going to have many users that are just normal PC desktop users where it'll be a good additive option for them."