Valve confirms it's working on the Steam Deck 2, but it's waiting for two things

Valve is launching the Steam Deck in Australia in a couple of weeks, and to celebrate the occasion, they set up shop at PAX Australia earlier this month to demonstrate and discuss the company's first foray into the world of PC gaming handhelds.

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After its initial launch in 2022 in the US and the arrival of the Steam Deck OLED variant in holiday 2023, you might be surprised to learn that the company is in no rush to create a sequel and is treating the Deck in much the same way Nintendo or Sony might when it comes to a traditional console generation.

Speaking with Reviews.org, Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang noted that a proper Steam Deck 2 won't be a thing until a chip can provide "a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life."

The company sees the OLED model as more of a refresh or premium edition, the same handheld albeit with a fancier display. Again, this is a similar approach to that we saw with Nintendo and the arrival of the Switch OLED, where something as simple as a display panel upgrade can deliver a perceivable improvement to visual quality.

The good news is that Valve is working on a Steam Deck 2 and is excited about the prospect of a second-generation device. It's unlikely that the Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, slated for a 2025 release, will present enough performance increase to meet Valve's generational leap and efficiency requirement. Its more powerful RDNA 3.5 graphics and increased power will find its way into portable gaming devices, but Valve isn't interested in releasing an incremental update or revised model every year.

"It is important to us, and we've tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence," said Lawrence Yang. "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."

Yang confirmed that, regarding Steam Deck 2, " We're excited about it, and we're working on it."