A Steam Deck Successor Is Still A Few Years Away

steam_deck_221

The Steam Deck is over a year old at this point, and despite using fairly impressive tech at the time of its launch, it’s already starting to feel pretty outdated. Other devices, like the Asus ROG Ally and the Switch-like Lenovo Legion Go, have chips inside that are generations ahead of the Deck, and performance on those devices is definitely better — though not by much. Valve will eventually release a Steam Deck successor, but it sounds like it’s still a few years off.

In an email to The Verge, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais – who’s been very hands-on with Steam Deck development – said that a successor is at least two years away, if not longer. Griffais says that Valve is trying to balance performance with battery life, and until there’s a bigger leap in efficiency or performance, a new Deck just isn’t going to happen.

“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 said, “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.”

He continued: “We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life. I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years, but we’re still closely monitoring innovations in architectures and fabrication processes to see where things are going there.”

That’s a little bit of a bummer for anyone waiting for an updated Deck to take the leap. At this stage, it looks like we could be waiting for 2025 or even 2026 before a new model is ready to release, and that’s a long time in the tech world. And that’s not even counting the various issues inherent to the Deck as it is, as I outlined in my reasons I won’t buy a Steam Deck.

Other companies in the handheld gaming PC space are iterating rapidly, with hardware manufacturers like AYN and Ayaneo pumping out multiple devices each year. Not all of them are perfect, and there’s still a long way to go on the software side of things to get anywhere close to SteamOS. But sooner or later, one of these devices is going to hit all the right marks — be it from a Chinese company, or one of the better-known manufacturers.

If Valve is lucky, that won’t be until after a Steam Deck successor is available. But 2026 is a long way away, y’know? And I certainly won’t be waiting, especially with the Switch successor likely just around the corner.