The Steamdeck is undoubtedly one of the most successful consoles for this year, recently reaching a total of 1 Million Steamdecks shipped. This is quite a big number considering the demand has outweighed the supply quite heavily since its launch earlier this year. As the interest for the Steamdeck peaks, so does the ecosystem around this consistently developing product.
Speaking to the Verge Recently, Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais, two of the designers behind the Steamdeck spoke about the possibility of making a Steam Controller 2.
When asked about a successor to the 2013 Steam controller, Yang’s response was positive, stating: “Yeah, we want to make it happen,”
“I think it’s likely that we’ll explore that because it’s something we wanted as well. Right now, we’re focusing on the Deck, so it’s a little bit of the same thing as the micro console question: it’s definitely something where we’d be excited to work with a third party or explore ourselves,” he says.
The controller was quite a cult classic when it was released back in 2013 as it featured two trackpads that provided laser point accuracy, perfect for shooters. Unfortunately, there were many roadblocks for the Steam controller and software confusion with the hardware (some games would not recognize the controller or register it as a mouse and keyboard or an Xbox controller). Steam, later on, added the ability to remap almost any controller essentially doing away with the need of having a gamepad specifically for Steam.
In the past, there has been talk of a multi-generational Steamdeck, but what exactly will be improved on the device is open to conversation. Now it looks like it won’t take on the shape of performance as Valve believe that there is merit in keeping a standard across the board. It looks like the company holds the same sentiment as Nintendo who, despite having the technology to create a “Nintendo Pro” have decided to rather create iterations don’t alter the performance of the console.
“Right now the fact that all the Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one target for users to understand what kind of performance level to expect when you’re playing and for developers to understand what to target… there’s a lot of value in having that one spec,” says Griffais.
“I think we’ll opt to keep the one performance level for a little bit longer, and only look at changing the performance level when there is a significant gain to be had,” he adds.
