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Journalism of Courage
Valve’s Steam Deck is a highly popular handheld gaming console in the market, especially among PC gaming enthusiasts. Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais, in an email to The Verge and CNBC, has now confirmed that the successor to the Steam Deck isn’t due for at least the next couple of years.
According to the email, “It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple: every Deck can play the same games. As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be had. We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life. I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years, but we’re still closely monitoring innovations in architectures and fabrication processes to see where things are going there.”
The Steam Deck was officially launched in 2022, and the company might not announce any new console until at least 2024. This aligns with the common practice in the console world, where, unlike an annual hardware refresh cycle like a smartphone or laptop, gaming consoles usually have a longer shelf life, and companies only announce new models once every four or five years.
Rather than focusing on a performance uplift, the company appears to be focused on enhancing battery life and including a better display, possibly one with a higher refresh rate, similar to the Asus ROG Ally (review). Right now, it does look like there will be no new hardware announcements from Valve related to the Steam Deck in the near future.
Similarly, the company also recently released Deck OS 3.5 Preview for enthusiasts with new features like variable refresh rate, HDR (when paired with a capable external display), and performance improvements for Starfield. The update is also said to have improved colour reproduction by switching to an sRGB colour gamut.
