Valve won't release a new Steam Deck console every year because “that's not really fair to their customers.”
The portable PC device will finally be available for purchase in Australia in November. Two of its Valve designers, Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat, were interviewed by Reviews.org and discussed the trend of annual hardware upgrades.
“It's important to us and we've tried to be very clear: We're not following the annual cadence,” Yang said. “We're not going to do an increase every year. There's no reason to do that. And honestly, from our perspective, it's not really fair to your customers to introduce something so early that it's just progressively better.
“So we really want to wait for a generational leap in computing without sacrificing battery life before we release the actual second generation of Steam Deck. But it's something we're excited about and working on.”
Valve first launched the Steam Deck in North America and Europe in 2022, followed by the OLED model in 2023.
While a Steam Deck 2 is in development, Valve told Eurogamer last year, before the launch of OLED, that the technology doesn't exist yet.
“Obviously we would love to get even more performance with the same power, but that technology doesn't exist yet,” Aldehayyat said. “That's what I think we would call Steam Deck 2.0.
“The first Steam Deck was the first moment where we felt there was enough GPU performance in a portable form factor that allows you to play all your Steam games. We would love to see the performance per watt trend progress rapidly towards doing that, But we're not there yet.”
It's certainly an interesting take on the company, considering Sony's upcoming PS5 Pro. It costs £700 and includes an upgraded GPU, among other features, although the improvements are incremental.
If you want to see the PS5 Pro in action, Digital Foundry has clips from The Last of Us Part 2 and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.