If you've been holding your breath for a Steam Deck 2, you may want to exhale.
Two members of the Steam Deck design team at Valve shared a big update about future versions of its groundbreaking handheld, hinting at a prolonged timeline for a follow-up to its popular handheld gaming PC.
While waiting for a next-gen Steam Deck isn't good news for anyone itching for an upgrade, Valve's methodical approach could actually be the right approach — one that benefits customers and brands alike.
Steam Deck designers tease long wait ahead for Steam Deck 2
Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve and previously Apple, and Yazan Aldehayyat, a hardware engineer at Valve, shared some major updates on the Steam Deck 2 in an October 11 interview.
There's good news and bad news. The bad news is, we might be in for a long wait before the release of the Steam Deck 2. Yang mentioned that Valve is not doing the "yearly cadence" of annual product refreshes like some of its competitors in the handheld gaming PC market.
Yang explained: "We’re not going to do a bump every year. 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. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck."
So, it sounds like the Steam Deck 2 isn't going to be available for at least another year or more. That's probably disappointing to a lot of gamers, but Yang also hinted at the good news: the next Steam Deck will be meaningfully better than the current model.
We'll have to wait for new processors to come out that offer a significant improvement over the current generation, but the result will be a Steam Deck 2 that's actually worth waiting for and spending hundreds of dollars on. If you're a current Steam Deck owner, you're also going to get your money's worth out of your handheld gaming PC since Valve isn't going to render old models obsolete every year.
Are yearly releases in tech disappearing?
Valve isn't the only brand leaving yearly releases in the past. Apple has also been moving away from annual refreshes recently. For instance, Apple just released the 7th-generation iPad Mini this month... after a three-year wait since the release of the 6th-generation model. Similarly, some Apple products have been consistently skipping a year or two between updates, like the iPhone SE, which gets a refresh every two years.
This approach is better for brands and customers. I find it more respectful to the actual cost of tech products and the investment they represent for users. If you're spending hundreds of dollars on a new tech product, you should be able to expect to get at least a few years of use out of it before upgrading to a newer model.
Pushing customers to trade-in or replace their devices every year diminishes the value of those devices, especially when the performance gap from one generation to the next is stagnating in many categories, like smartphones and tablets.
The same applies to handheld gaming PCs which rely on chipmakers to develop more advanced processors before updates are really possible. Handheld gaming PCs are still an emerging market, too, which means the development and optimization timeline for new models can be longer than something like a gaming laptop or a phone.
Removing the arbitrary deadline of an annual release gives development and design teams the time they need to make a handheld gaming PC the best it can be — before it launches. As we saw with the MSI Claw's turbulent initial release, brands are still figuring out how to stick the landing with handheld gaming PCs. Software updates can address certain issues but a rocky initial launch can doom a new handheld.
I'd much rather wait a few extra months (or years) to see a polished device hit the market instead. So I won't be holding my breath for the Steam Deck 2, but I'm on board with the long wait.
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