You'll Have To Wait At Least Two Years For A Faster Steam Deck

An upgraded Steam Deck may be coming, but don't expect anything until late 2025 at the earliest. Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that the company wanted to upgrade the Deck's performance without sacrificing its battery life, which may not yet be possible.

Another concern Griffais raised is around brand messaging. A higher-performance Steam Deck could play games that the current Steam Deck can't, which could cause problems with both developers and customers. That does leave room for an upgraded, but not more powerful Steam Deck, i.e. a model with longer battery life or a higher quality screen. Here's the full statement Griffais gave the Verge:

"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."

Griffais also spoke to CNBC on a similar topic, affirming that Valve is currently happy with the Steam Deck's power. He said, "We're looking at this performance target that we have as a stable target for a couple years. We think that it's a pretty sweet spot in terms of being able to play all the new experiences from this new generation." Some recent releases have strained the capabilities of the Deck, like Redfall and Starfield. However, the fact that Baldur's Gate 3 is Steam-Deck-verified speaks to the handheld's capabilities.

The quote echoes similar statements Valve gave earlier this year. New Steam Deck challengers are also on the horizon. Lenovo is looking to enter the PC handheld market with a device called Legion Go, which has Switch-like detachable controllers according to leaked images. The Asus ROG Ally and new Aya Neo models have also recently launched.