Steam Deck Designers Explain Improvements Planned For V2 System

In a recent interview, Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke about some of the ideas they have for a potential gen-2 Steam Deck.

Speaking to The Verge about the Steam Deck and Valve's hardware as a whole, Yang and Griffais briefly touched on what we could expect from a second-generation Steam Deck. According to the pair of designers, the big things they'd want to address in a new edition of the handheld would be the console's screen and its battery life.

Nintendo has obviously done that with its revisions of the Switch, the biggest upgrade being the OLED. But obviously the thing many would be looking for is improved performance. On that note, Griffais explained that they aren't planning any major jumps in performance capability at the moment.

"Right now the fact that all the Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one target for users to understand what kind of performance level to expect when you’re playing and for developers to understand what to target... there’s a lot of value in having that one spec," said Griffais. "I think we’ll opt to keep the one performance level for a little bit longer, and only look at changing the performance level when there is a significant gain to be had."

Obviously we don't know when we can expect an update version of the Steam Deck, but Yang did confirm in the interview that Valve is interested in making a Steam Controller 2 as well. "We want to make that happen," said Yang. "It’s just a question of how and when. I think it’s likely that we’ll explore that because it’s something we wanted as well. Right now, we’re focusing on the Deck, so it’s a little bit of the same thing as the microconsole question: It’s definitely something where we’d be excited to work with a third-party or explore ourselves."

The full interview is worth reading for the variety of other topics it touches on--it confirms that audio mixing is coming for when you have more than one app running, and it addresses things like the ability to switch between the Deck and desktop seamlessly.