Valve Explains Why They Won’t Upgrade The Steam Deck Anytime Soon

gameranx.com:

Valve has explained why they have no plans to upgrade or make an updated Steam Deck anytime soon.

Announced in 2021, the Steam Deck was released a year later. At the time of its production, Valve was able to stock it with Ryzen 2 powered CPUs, the latest chips made by AMD at the time.

Valve went through quite a few growing pains with the Steam Deck. Their supply and distribution system alone hadn’t been properly figured out at launch, prompting the company to stagger its sale around the world until they were ready.

In the meantime, AMD revealed this year that they had finally been able to produce a CPU designed for mobile use, called the Z1 and Z1 Extreme. Those chips are found in the ASUS ROG Ally, and will also be in the Lenovo Legion Go.

So the interest would naturally be there for Valve to update their Steam Deck with the new CPU. However, as reported by Dexerto, Valve employee Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke about why Valve wasn’t doing this yet.

“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.”

Now, some gamers may want to say that the Z1 Extreme is a significant enough leap to justify upgrading with a more powerful batch of Steam Decks, but it’s easy to see what Valve is planning here.

Valve endeavors to treat their Steam Deck platform like a video game console platform. Each console company introduces third parties to their hardware and works with an assumption that they will be making games on the same hardware for a significant period