For Valve, the Steam Deck OLED is just the beginning
The Steam Deck OLED isn’t the sequel to the original Steam Deck; it’s the predecessor improved to its full potential. The Steam Deck 2 — for lack of a better name — will likely appear in two to three years, when Valve feels it can use nascent hardware to produce a “generational leap” in performance. But it’s unlikely Valve will stop here. After talking with members of the Steam Deck team, it sounds as if the next few years of Steam Deck are only the beginning.
“Although Steam Deck is super successful, it’s still very early for handheld gaming,” says Yazan Aldehayyat, a hardware engineer at Valve. “There’s still a lot of work to be done. We don’t see ourselves as achieving all of our goals any time soon. There are multiple years ahead of us.”
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Aldehayyat compared the potential of PC handhelds to the rise of smartphones, a period in which many giant tech companies competed to make major improvements from year to year. “We see Asus and other companies and we love that,” says Aldehayyat. “We’d love for more companies to make some. I think Steam Deck OLED is a further data point to show in a year and a half [that] we moved this far.”
Of course, it’s not surprising that Valve would see itself as Apple in this situation. “Valve has a unique perspective,” says Lawrence Yang, a UX designer at Valve. “We can do the Apple thing where we have the whole stack. It lets us move quicker and leaner and do other things other companies might not be able to do. And just like other companies have other strengths, customers will have more options to choose from.”
When pressed for an example, Yang noted that Valve has a direct relationship with developers through the Steam store. As we’ve already seen, many studios will optimize to not
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