HANDHELD NEWS – Gabe Newell’s company is slowly shaping the next generation of hardware that revolutionized handheld PCs.
It has been two years since Valve unveiled the Steam Deck OLED, a version of the handheld PC that was originally released in February 2022 with an LCD display. Fans of the device demanded a more powerful version at the time, but Valve said the Steam Deck 2 would not be released until 2025 or 2026 because the necessary technology was not yet available. Recently, Valve announced the Frame headset, the new Steam Machine, and the new Steam Controller. There is no new Deck in sight. When asked again by IGN, software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais reiterated that the time has not yet come, although the company already has a good idea of what the new Deck will be like.
“The Steam Deck is obviously not our focus today, but we’re still interested in working on the next Steam Deck. The important thing is that the performance upgrade is significant enough to justify its own product. We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20, 30, or even 50 percent more powerful with the same battery life. We want something more significant than that. We’ve been working backward from silicon advancements and architectural improvements. I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of the Steam Deck will be. However, there are currently no offerings in the system on a chip (SOC) landscape that we believe will provide the next-gen performance of a Steam Deck,” Griffais said.
It seems that we will most likely have to wait until the second half of 2027. This means that the new Deck could compete directly with the PlayStation handheld developed by Sony. Rumor has it that the PlayStation handheld will offer performance similar to that of the base model PlayStation 5. Since both devices will be based on AMD technology, they may offer similar performance if they are released around the same time at a similar price.
Of course, there are still many uncertainties at this point, as these devices are a few years away.
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