Valve has just announced its biggest hardware push that it’s arguably ever made — a living room game console called the Steam Machine, a headset called the Steam Frame, and the long-awaited sequel to its Steam Controller it hinted about three years back.
But Valve won’t say the first word about its next gaming handheld, the Steam Deck 2.
“Steam Deck is not what we’re here to talk about today,” Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told us at the very beginning of our briefing. “It’s sort of related but not really,” he said, before launching into a discussion of how the Steam Deck’s learnings underpinned every new product that it’s announcing today.
The company wouldn’t tell us if the new drift-resistant TMR joysticks it’s introducing in the Steam Controller and Steam Frame’s wands will make it into a future Steam Deck, either. “We’re always thinking about Steam Deck and ways to improve it in the future,” says Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali when I ask. (He also says Valve currently has no plans to offer the TMR joysticks as a drop-in module for the original Deck.)
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While Valve has repeatedly confirmed that the Steam Deck will have sequels, the company’s also repeatedly been clear that it’s in no hurry to bring them to market. Since 2022, Griffais has consistently told us that Valve wants to see a significant leap in performance and efficiency before it takes the plunge. “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,” is how Valve’s Lawrence Yang concisely reiterated it to Reviews.org in 2024.
The question now is: Will Valve find that leap in performance and efficiency from x86? Because while Valve initially thought its standalone VR headset might run on the existing Steam Deck’s chip, the company just announced the Steam Frame with an Arm processor instead — using emulation to let it play some Windows games locally on the headset. Griffais tells me he thinks Arm has “a lot of potential” in future handhelds someday.
Valve tells us the Frame has a lower performance target than the nearly four-year-old Steam Deck, so it would need a far more potent Arm chip to power such a handheld. Qualcomm, in particular, has been working on Arm chips for handhelds, though, and one of its customers for the latest was even interested in discussing a possible SteamOS handheld with Valve.
It’s also possible Valve already found its next Steam Deck chip in AMD’s future roadmaps — like it did with the original Steam Deck — and is simply waiting for it to arrive.
None of that necessarily means you should expect an Arm-based Steam Deck 2 just yet, though.
