If you are worried about Steam Deck being replaced by another model as soon as you purchase it, then there’s good news for you!
Valve has revealed that it won’t be releasing a new Steam Deck console; instead, it will wait to deliver a true technological leap forward before unveiling the next version. They will skip the yearly updates because “that’s kind of not really fair to your customers.”
The Steam Deck will be available to purchase in Australia in November.
Two of its designers from Valve, Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat, were interviewed by Reviews.org. In the interview, Yang said, “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. 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.”
He further added, “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 is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.”
Although a Steam Deck 2 is in development, Valve says not to expect any regular updates from the hardware; they are not against releasing any new versions. Previously, they mentioned that the slower upgrades are because the cadence is simply impossible to achieve.
Aldehayyat said, “Obviously we’d love to get even more performance in the same power envelope, but that technology doesn’t exist yet.“
He added, “The first Steam Deck was the first moment in time where we felt like there was enough GPU performance in a portable form factor that lets you play all your Steam games. We would love for the trend of perf-per-watt to progress rapidly to do that, but it’s not quite there yet.“
