“There’s no reason to do that” – Steam Deck won’t have yearly refreshes

As a long-time gaming enthusiast who has seen countless gadgets come and go, I wholeheartedly appreciate Valve’s stance on the Steam Deck. Having experienced the frustration of yearly hardware refreshes that often only bring incremental improvements, it’s refreshing to see a company prioritizing consumer interests over profits.


According to a recent interview with reviews.org, two designers from Valve, namely Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldenhayyat, clarified that Valve does not plan on launching a brand new Steam Deck every year.

As a conscientious consumer, I find it crucial for us not to adhere to the annual hardware updates that seem prevalent in the tech industry today. I believe these frequent refreshes are more detrimental than beneficial to consumers like us.

There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better.

Yang clarified that they are planning to hold off on revealing the second-generation Steam Deck until a significant advancement in computing has been achieved, while maintaining optimal battery life. However, they’ve been putting in a lot of effort towards achieving this goal.

Valve has been discussing the potential creation of a Steam Deck 2 following its launch in North America and Europe. However, they feel that technological advancements have not progressed sufficiently at this time to warrant such a development.

The first Steam Deck was the first moment in time where we felt like there was enough GPU performance in a portable form factor that lets you play all your Steam games. We would love for the trend of perf-per-watt to progress rapidly to do that, but it’s not quite there yet.

As long as we don’t see substantial improvement in power efficiency, it’s unlikely that there will be a second version of the Steam Deck.

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2024-10-22 13:09