Valve launched the Steam Deck last year as a portable Linux-based PC that lets you play loads of games on the go. Although the company has confirmed from time to time that the Steam Deck is a multigenerational product, it has also been careful to note that an upgrade isn"t coming anytime soon.
In the latest development, Valve"s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge that a faster Steam handheld isn"t coming in the next couple of years. The game company doesn"t want to sacrifice power efficiency and battery life for more powerful performance.
Here’s what Griffais told the outlet:
It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple, where 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.
While the performance of the future Steam Decks might remain the same, Valve has previously confirmed it wants to improve the display and battery life.
The original model’s battery can give you an average of 2-8 hours of gameplay on a single charge depending on how you tweak your settings or use your console. As for the display, Steam Deck brings a 7-inch, 60Hz, 1280 x 800 IPS LCD with 400-nit brightness.
It might be 2025, even 2026 before a Deck 2 arrives, so you"ll have to wait and see what the future could look like for a Steam Deck successor.