In an interview with Australia's Reviews.org, Valve employees Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat reiterated that the Steam Deck is not updated annually, which has been making the rounds online.

This is both interesting and not that surprising, given that Yang said essentially the same thing in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun last year. At the time, he said that a Steam Deck sequel “won't happen for a few years.”

Steam Deck sits in an odd place, straddling the line between console and gaming PC, like the Nintendo Switch (the Nintendo Switch 2 should be released next year). The difference between the two is that consoles are generally not released every year. [It's been four years since the PS5 was launched in 2020, and it has only gone through a series of adjustments like the smaller PS5 Slim launched last year and the very expensive PS5 Pro that was just announced. Xbox and Nintendo, on the other hand, have only increased storage or attached larger OLED displays (no, we're not forgetting the Nintendo Switch Lite). [Just as the Copilot PC, which launched with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip, will be powered by an Intel Lunar Lake variant this fall.

It also depends on the lens. If the Steam Deck is a gaming machine, then it makes sense that it would not be a once-a-year affair. If you see the Steam Deck as more of a new PC, then you would probably expect something more annually.

“It's important to us and we've really tried to be clear. 'We're not going to bump every year. There's no reason to do that. And honestly, from our perspective, it's kind of not really fair to your customers.

Jan said that until there is a “generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life,” we probably won't see anything.

“Obviously you want to get even higher performance at the same power envelope, but that technology doesn't exist yet,” Aldheyat added. That's what we should call Steam Deck 2.0.”

“The first Steam Deck was the first time we felt there was enough GPU performance in a portable form factor to play all Steam games. We're hoping that the perf-per-watt trend will move fast enough to make that happen, but we're not there yet."

‘We're not there yet,’

”We're not there yet.

They confirmed that some version of Steam Deck 2 is in development, but it has been out of the bag for some time. Still, we may not see that device for at least another couple of years.

In the meantime, a number of competing handheld gaming PCs have appeared in response to Valve's success with the Steam Deck. Most of them are Windows machines (unlike the Steam Deck) and, like the newly updated Asus ROG Ally X, offer a great experience despite poor battery life.

Additionally, Valve may face competition from Xbox and Sony, as both are rumored to be working on their own handheld gaming consoles that will be released along with the next generation of consoles.