You read our headline. Can you guess why Valve isn’t ready to announce or release a Steam Deck 2 yet?
In a new interview in PAX Australia, Valve employees explained the dilemma facing them in making a new generation of their bespoke gaming handheld.
As reported by Dexerto, Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat and Designer Jay Shaw did confirm that Valve is planning it.1 Shaw started it off by saying:
“We’re most certainly looking to the future. Everything we’ve worked on up until now has led to the Steam Deck in the hardware space, and this is continuing to inform a bunch of decisions we’re making going forward.”
And then Aldehayyat just says it:
“We are working on Steam Deck 2. There is going to be a successor.”
So there’s definitely no question that Valve has passion for their hardware, and they want to make that next generation with the changes and improvements they can’t do on the current models.
That passion led them to the eager arms of AMD, who had just launched the industry changing Ryzen CPUs, and successfully sold Valve in using their second-generation Ryzen on their handheld.
A funny thing happened while they were developing that handheld, and afterwards. AMD kept iterating on the Ryzen technology, but as astounding that initial launch was, with each iteration AMD wasn’t as able to match that technical achievement.
In fact, we reported on a rumor two months ago that AMD bid against Nvidia for the contract for the Switch 2 CPU and lost. If AMD met Sony’s, Microsoft’s, and Valve’s standards, they didn’t pass Nintendo’s. And that’s because Nintendo isn’t just looking at the higher numbers that AMD hardware can raise in performance tests.
AMD’s CPU couldn’t beat Nvidia in power efficiency, the metric that matters for portable gaming. Outputting the best graphics is the best if you’re only playing at home, tethered to a power supply and internet connection. On the road, you should actually be able to dial that back to play longer, a lesson Nintendo learned to great success since the Game Boy.
So Valve’s current partner is lacking in innovation in that department, and they aren’t seeing what they need in other potential partners either. In Aldehayyat’s words:
“Performance is what defines the Steam Deck 2. We need to have a generational jump in performance before we make it. We’re just waiting on that, is what it comes down to.”
Shaw added:
“The hardware team is always looking at what’s next. They’re iterating constantly.”
While we brought up the prospect of Valve switching hardware partners, they didn’t do so here. It seems Valve is willing to be patient and wait for AMD to make that jump. While enthusiasts have spoken for years about how AMD’s chips keep beating Intel’s in the market, that really only obscures the dilemma AMD’s partners have.
Will we then wait 5 years or longer for that Steam Deck 2? It seemingly depends on how long AMD can make that mobile CPU that brings improvements so substantial that even non-techies can feel it. It seems PC gamers are more than happy than what they’re getting now, so AMD doesn’t feel that pressure at all.
Could Valve switch to Nvidia? It’s certainly not impossible, even if Nvidia still works with Nintendo. And we also wouldn’t rule out Valve going for the dark horse with Qualcomm. We suspect those two companies could deliver on the performance innovation that AMD is dragging their heels on for the Steam Deck 2. But that’s for Valve to decide on, not us.
