The Steam Deck has been a big hardware success for Valve, so it’s not entirely surprising the company is already thinking about a successor to its portable handheld gaming PC. But if you’re hoping for a Steam Deck 2 to come out anytime soon, we are still at least a “couple of years away”.
Speaking to The Verge, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said the next iteration of the Steam Deck could be released as early as late 2025, explaining that Valve wants the next iteration of the handheld to be both a great leap in performance while ensuring battery life won’t be a significant issue.
“It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers and that the message to customers is simple, where every Deck can play the same games,” Griffais told The Verge. “As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be had. We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life.”
The comment on battery life is unsurprising, as it’s one of the biggest complaints about the Steam Deck. As IGN’s Steam Deck review points out, battery life is a “massive problem” while running Windows. Even when running the native SteamOS on the device, we noted “battery life still wasn’t great”, citing God of War on default settings chewed through a fully charged Steam Deck in just 90 minutes.
While battery life issues can be prevented by tethering the Steam Deck to various items, from its charging cable to a power bank and even some USB-C hubs, having poor battery life performance puts a damper on the core concept of the handheld.
The end of the statement from Griffais notes he does “not anticipate such a leap” to occur for at least the next couple of years and that Valve is “closely monitoring” the advancements made in architecture and fabrication processes as the company is hard at work making a successor to the Steam Deck. Here’s hoping the next Steam Deck includes an OLED display.
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
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