'The next thing we're working on moving forward is Steam Deck 2,' but Valve has yet to see silicon offering the leap it's looking for
Valve has been adamant to talk up the new Steam Deck OLED as «the definitive first-generation Steam Deck» and definitely not anything like a sequel to its immensely popular inaugural handheld PC. But if you were under any illusions that it wasn't coming Valve has confirmed «it's definitely something we're working on and planning for.»
Which shouldn't come as any surprise, considering how well-received the Steam Deck has been, and indeed the impact that it's had on the handheld PC market as a whole. But Valve doesn't have a lot of history in the hardware space of making sequels. I mean, you could argue the same is true to a certain extent in the software space given how long people have been talking about a specific crowbar-wielding threequel.
But the Valve Index was one of the best VR headsets around and, despite many rumours, we've still yet to see any evidence of a brand new set of Steamy VR goggles.
And maybe that's for the same reason that we're not going to see a Steam Deck 2 for a while yet, because the hardware it wants to use has yet to be made. Valve's Pierre-Loupe Griffais has already been on record to say that it doesn't think the architectural and performance leaps it wants will «be possible in the next couple of years.»
Which was something Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat, both long-time members of the Steam Deck team, said to me when I caught up with them around the launch of the new OLED model.
«It needs to be the right time,» says Yang. «And we have to have the right parts for it. So we really want there to be a generational leap in performance for us to be able to comfortably call it a Steam Deck 2.»
While the new device does indeed have a new APU inside it, the AMD Sephiroth chip, it is essentially
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