Is a Steam Deck 2 Coming Soon?

The Steam Deck has been out for two and a half years now and many fans are wondering if Valve is working on a successor of the console.

Steam Deck 2 Is Still a Long Way Off

When it comes to handheld consoles, it’s difficult to beat the Steam Deck’s ability to let you play AAA titles while lounging in your bed. It’s safe to say that the device ushered in a new age for portable gaming and set a new standard for the industry.

Despite that, this success does not mean that fans and tech enthusiasts don’t want to see a new iteration of the device soon. The Steam Deck is not perfect and could benefit greatly from the numerous improvements in the APU industry over the past five or so years.

Unfortunately for many gamers, Valve has confirmed that a Steam Deck successor will not be hitting the store shelves anytime soon. The company’s reasoning is that it’s pointless to spend time and effort on a Steam Deck 2 before the industry as a whole has a “generational leap in computing”.

Why We Won’t See a Steam Deck 2 Soon?

Technically, the Steam Deck, which is AMD-based, has components that date back to 2020. The device uses a custom chip codenamed Van Gogh, based on the RDNA 2 architecture. Meanwhile, its APU featured four Zen 2 cores and an eight Compute Unit-based RDNA 2 iGPU, which date from around the same time. Even with the OLED refresh in 2023, performance improvements were notable for their absence.

Unfortunately for fans, even the latest improvements in the tech industry are not enough according to Valve, to justify a new Steam Deck. AMD’s latest Strix Point APUs (Ryzen AI 300) are based on Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5, but it seems Valve is taking an approach similar to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, and not rushing to develop a new console. Even the newest PS5 Pro is still based on the old Zen 2 architecture.

“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,” said team Deck designer Lawrence Yang. Even Intel’s Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) CPUs don’t seem to be enough for Valve to make a Steam Deck 2 right now.

APUs nowadays are hardly faster at sub-15W levels than they were with Rembrandt (Ryzen 6000 Mobile). Lunar Lake is considered a step forward, but even that doesn’t seem to be enough for Valve. Valve is also working on an ARM64 version of Proton, so using Arm cores alongside a GPU solution from Intel/AMD/NVIDIA is also a possibility like the Nintendo Switch.

What Do Gamers Say About This?

Naturally, the gaming community had quite some splitting views on Valve’s decision. On the one hand, there were some who praised the company for this, as they thought the end product would be better as Valve would not rush development. Fans of the console said there doesn’t need to be a replacement for the Steam Deck until there is a noticeable improvement, essentially agreeing with Yang’s words.

However, other fans criticized Valve for seemingly not doing enough for their current product. “FINALLY! Valve finally had the courage to confirm the Steam deck didn’t get an annual update when it was a year old … 2 years ago,” one fan wrote.