Steam Deck 2 could have better screen and battery life – but not performance

techradar.com:

Valve has shared some new info on what advancements will be made with the Steam Deck 2 – including better battery life – and further expressed a desire to make a Steam Controller 2.

Valve has made no secret that there will be a sequel to the Steam Deck – indeed, multiple iterations of the handheld gaming PC – and in an interview with The Verge(opens in new tab), Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais touched on a couple of priorities for the Steam Deck 2.

When asked about the major sticking points which needed to be fixed with the next incarnation of the handheld, both answered that they were longer battery life, and improving the screen.

What about faster performance and smoother frame rates, then? Apparently, this isn’t in the cards, as Griffais told The Verge: “Right now the fact that all the Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one target for users to understand what kind of performance level to expect when you’re playing and for developers to understand what to target… there’s a lot of value in having that one spec.”

He added: “I think we’ll opt to keep the one performance level for a little bit longer, and only look at changing the performance level when there is a significant gain to be had.”

As we mentioned at the outset, the topic of a sequel to the Steam Controller came up, and Yang chimed in: “Yeah, we want to make it happen. It’s just a question of how and when.”

So there will be sequels to both of these pieces of hardware, although the Steam Deck 2 is clearly the focus for Valve – but the Steam Controller 2 will be something that’s likely to be explored, Yang notes.

The Valve employees also go into the major efforts the company is making to get games running nicely on the Steam