If you've been eyeing up a Steam Deck and have been contemplating waiting until a more powerful follow-up console arrives before picking one up, you might want to change that plan. Because Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais has now revealed that a Steam Deck successor is still years away.
Speaking with The Verge, Griffais notes that we could be waiting until 2025 or even 2026 before a Steam Deck 2 makes its debut. The reason is down to Valve needing to set a strict performance target for the system for developers to hit, and it doesn't intend to shift away from what the Steam Deck currently targets unless there is a significant improvement to be made.
Griffais states: "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. 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. 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."
Do you think that the Steam Deck needs a successor soon or are you happy with the device as it is currently?