Don't expect a Steam Deck 2 until silicon breakthroughs arrive, says Valve

Valve wants more than a 50% gain in performance-per-watt

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Forward-looking: Following the excitement over Valve's announcement of three new pieces of hardware this week, some asked the question, "but where's the Steam Deck 2?" According to the company, we won't see a successor to the four-year-old device until technology is available that enables an enormous performance boost over the current Steam Deck – and without sacrificing battery life.

Valve Software Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais talked to IGN about the prospect of a Steam Deck 2. He admitted that Valve does plan to release the next-gen portable at some point, as expected, but only when silicon has advanced to the point where it feels like a massive upgrade over the current Steam Deck.

"The thing we're making sure of is that it's a worthwhile enough performance upgrade [for a Steam Deck 2] to make sense as a standalone product," Griffais told the gaming publication. "We're not interested in getting to a point where it's 20 or 30 or even 50 percent more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that."

"So we've been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there's no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck," Griffais continued.

Portable gaming technology has made several advancements since the Steam Deck launched in February 2022. The AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme in the new ROG Xbox Ally X, for example, is a Zen 5-based chip that has 8 cores and an RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 890M GPU with 16 compute units. The Steam Deck, in contrast, uses a 4-core Zen 2 APU and an RDNA 2-based GPU with 8 CUs.

Maintaining or increasing battery life in the Steam Deck 2 is just as important to Valve as the performance improvements. It's never been the Steam Deck's strongest suit, so it appears that Valve is determined to address this issue.

Griffais never gave any hint of how much Valve's next handheld might cost. The Steam OLED is $549, which is relatively cheap compared to the $1,000 ROG Xbox Ally X. It's likely that Valve will aim for a price point somewhere between the two, probably toward the lower end.

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None of this gives us a hint of when the Steam Deck 2 will arrive, of course – it will be up to Valve to decide when it feels technology has advanced enough to create a portable gaming device worthy of succeeding the Steam Deck. In August, prominent leaker KeplerL2 predicted that it wouldn't be here until 2028, at which point AMD will likely have released APUs based on Zen 6 and RDNA 5.

For the foreseeable future, Valve will be busy promoting and supporting the newly announced Steam Machine, Steam Frame VR, and Steam Controller 2, all of which will launch in 2026.

_{Image credit: Georgiy Lyamin}