Valve won’t do yearly Steam Deck models, Steam Deck 2 will be a “generational leap”

Steam Deck

While Valve’s Steam Deck handheld gaming PC has been wildly popular, the company has doubled down on not releasing regular updates to the hardware.

A new interview with Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang has confirmed Valve will not release updates to the hardware with minor improvements, rather they want to wait for a “generational leap” in computing power before putting out a new Steam Deck.

“It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence,” Yang said to Reviews.org. “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 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.”

Yang’s commitment to waiting for seriously upgraded hardware before putting out a new Steam Deck echoes previous statements from the company. Furthermore, its OLED variant was released soon after its original LCD version though it didn’t have any tangible hardware upgrades, save its display.

Despite not committing to a new Steam Deck model in the near future, later in the interview Yang did confirm Valve is naturally working on a new Steam Deck successor. Competitors like Asus have released their own take on the Steam Deck and even Microsoft is rumored to be making their own handheld.

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