With the release of the new Steam Controller, the Steam Machine, and now the Steam Frame VR headset, this year has been chock-full of Valve hardware releases. So, what could possibly be next—the Steam Deck 2? To some extent, sure; Valve has been "hard at work" on its next handheld gaming PC pretty much since the original Steam Deck launched back in 2022. What's surprising, though, is that Valve claims the RAMpocalypse hasn't hugely affected its plans.
Despite the clear impact on the pricing of both the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told IGN that the memory supply crisis has "not really" affected the company's plans for the Steam Deck successor. He added, "We've talked before about how we want to make sure there's a very delineated performance improvement for something like a future Steam Deck, and I think we're still looking at it in the same way."
"It's just a matter of looking at the current conditions and seeing how and when we can deliver something like that," Griffais says, "But from what we're working on, as far as the user experience goes and what the product that we're trying to build goes, it's very similar goals."
Valve has been saying as far back as 2023 that it was waiting for "a generational leap in performance" to justify a follow-up, so that part of the strategy has remained consistent. That the company isn't rushing to push out an overpriced Steam Deck successor is arguably no bad thing either, especially given that the price for the 1 TB version of the original Steam Deck has now ballooned to $949.
It's good to hear that the Deck 2 is still being worked on despite the ongoing memory shortage. The Steam Frame and Steam Machine were already announced and shown off essentially as finished products late last year, so those would be hard (but not impossible) to back out of. Although Valve has said it's working on a Steam Deck 2, it doesn't seem to be quite so close to release, and concerns that the company could bin the project are a bit more pertinent than with the other products.
Valve obviously won't attempt to squeeze the launch of the Steam Deck 2 into an already packed year, but the memory supply crisis has likely pushed the handheld's release further out too.
But just how far out could a Steam Deck 2 release be? Well, Valve itself does not see an imminent end to the supply crisis, though some major memory players predict things could improve around late 2027 or early 2028 thanks to a surge in Chinese capacity. Other predictions suggest we should only be so lucky, with both SK hynix's CEO and Phison's CEO saying demand could continue to outstrip supply until 2030.
In light of those circumstances, 'not really' feels a bit like an exercise in measured understatement to me. At any rate, here's hoping we're not waiting until 2030 for a Steam Deck successor.
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