Valve has announced that it won’t release a new Steam Deck console every year, explaining that such a move would be unfair to customers. This comes as the handheld PC device is set to launch in Australia this November. Valve designers Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat addressed the topic of yearly hardware refreshes in an interview with Reviews.org, emphasizing the company’s approach to hardware updates.
Yang clarified that Valve does not plan to follow a yearly release cycle for the Steam Deck, saying,
“It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence. We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, it’s not really fair to your customers to come out with something that’s only incrementally better so soon.”
He stressed that Valve is focused on making significant generational improvements before releasing a new version of the Steam Deck. Their goal is to wait for a leap in computing power without compromising battery life before introducing the next generation of the device.
Valve launched the Steam Deck in 2022 across North America and Europe, followed by the release of an OLED model in 2023. While a Steam Deck 2 is in development, Valve has clarified that the necessary technological advancements still need to be made available to justify a new release. Aldehayyat explained to Eurogamer last year,
“Obviously, we’d love to get even more performance in the same power envelope, but that technology doesn’t exist yet. That’s what I think we’d call a Steam Deck 2.0.”
Aldehayyat also noted that the original Steam Deck marked a significant moment in portable gaming, as it provided sufficient GPU performance to play the entire Steam library on a handheld device. While Valve is optimistic about future advancements in performance per watt, the technology has yet to progress enough to merit a new Steam Deck.
This approach stands in contrast to other companies, such as Sony, which is releasing the PS5 Pro, an upgraded version of the PS5 with incremental improvements like a better GPU.