With Valve revealing plans to launch new hardware, including a console, it might seem logical that the Steam Deck will eventually see some sort of successor, but simply put, the team isn’t gunning for that.
In an interview with IGN, Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais said as much, noting that Valve isn’t interested in small performance boosts for the future of the Steam Deck, instead, it wants big performance enhancements. It wants to make sure whatever upgrade comes next makes sense to be a standalone product, not being interested in getting things even to a point where it’s 50% more powerful at the same battery life.
“Obviously the Steam Deck’s not our focus today, but the same things we’ve said in the past where we’re really interested to work on what’s next for Steam Deck… the thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product.
We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that. So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SOC landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.“
