Valve says its 'not really fair to your customers' to create yearly iterations of something like the Steam Deck, instead it's waiting 'for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life'

pcgamer.com:

Valve Deck duo, Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat, have been doing the press rounds recently as Australia is finally getting itself a proper Steam Deck release in that territory. As part of that, Yang and Aldehayyat have had to field the now-standard questions about a potential Steam Deck 2.

Unsurprisingly, their answer in an interview with Reviews.org (via Eurogamer) remains the same as last year, namely that Valve wants to wait until there is a tangible improvement in the technological ecosystem around handheld gaming PCs before even thinking about a new version.

Obviously the release of the Steam Deck OLED, the year after the original came out, might have led some folk to expect some sort of yearly cadence of Valve-y handheld tech updates. Though, probably not anyone who has had anything to do with Valve and PC hardware releases...

You only have to look at the Valve Index VR headset, and all the noises about a second version or sequel to that smart bit of tech, to see that Gabe's gang isn't about to spit out new, barely iterative hardware just for the sake of tacking a '2' onto the box. And if we want to talk about long-lost sequels, you could make a nod to Valve's software devs and a certain Freeman-related series.

And Valve's Deck team was also determined to make it clear when the OLED device came out that it absolutely wasn't a sequel. All of which means no-one should have expected it to be repeated this year.

For reference, Yang said in this latest interview that: «It is important to us, and we've tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence.»

«We're not going to do a bump every year,» he continues. «There's no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that's kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that's only incrementally better. So, we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it