Valve: don’t expect a faster Steam Deck ‘in the next couple of years’

theverge.com:

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Valve has been clear it wants to build a Steam Deck 2 — and equally clear that a faster handheld wouldn’t arrive soon. Now, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge and CNBC that it could be late 2025 or beyond before it raises that bar — because it wants to see a leap in performance without a significant hit to battery life.

“I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years,” he told me via email.

Here’s the whole quote:

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. 

Earlier today, he spoke to CNBC on the same topic, saying “We’re looking at this performance target that we have as a stable target for a couple years.” Since the Steam Deck was released in February 2022, I assumed he was probably talking about 2024.

But “the next couple of years” is a longer timeframe than I thought — and while the Steam Deck can still technically play the latest PC games, it’s getting harder with the latest wave of demanding / poorly optimized games like Th