But Valve won’t be saying the first word about its next gaming handheld, the Steam Deck 2.
“Steam Deck is not what we’re here to talk about today,” Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told us at the beginning of our briefing. “It’s kind of related but not really,” he said before launching into a discussion of how Steam Deck’s learnings underpin every new product it’s announcing today.
The company won’t tell us whether the Steam Controller and the new drift-resistant TMR joystick being offered in the Steam Frame’s wand will make it into a future Steam deck. “We’re always thinking about the Steam Deck and ways to improve it in the future,” says Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali when I ask. (He also said that Valve currently has no plans to offer the TMR joystick as a drop-in module for the original deck.)
While Valve has repeatedly confirmed that there will be Steam Deck sequels, the company has also repeatedly made clear that it is in no rush to bring them to market. Since 2022, Griffiths has consistently told us that Valve wants to see a significant leap in performance and efficiency before moving forward. “We really want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship a true second generation of Steam Deck,” Valve’s Lawrence Yang succinctly reiterated on Reviews.org in 2024.
The question now is, will Valve make the leap in performance and efficiency from x86? Because Valve initially thought its standalone VR headset could run on the existing Steam Deck’s chip, the company instead announced the Steam Frame with Arm processors – using emulation to let it play some Windows games locally on the headset. Griffis told me he thinks Arm will have “a lot of potential” in a future handheld someday.
It’s also possible that Valve has already got its next Steam Deck chip in AMD’s future roadmap – as was the case with the original Steam Deck – and is simply waiting for it to arrive.