The Valve Steam Deck quickly became a big hit. Gamers essentially had a portable gaming PC in their hands. With players being able to enjoy modern titles on the go, there might be some wondering if holding out for the Steam Deck 2 is worth the wait. After all, we see new hardware components released regularly for the PC, which can give players a bit more bump in power and performance. So recently, The Verge opted to find out when they had an interview between two designers of the Valve Steam Deck.
The Verge managed to speak with Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais. During their conversation, the topic of a Steam Deck successor came up. If you thought it would be best to hold off on buying a Steam Deck because a more powerful version was underway, you might want to go ahead and purchase the current model now. It doesn’t look like there are any efforts right now to bring out a new, more powerful version of the Steam Deck. But that’s not because Valve is losing interest in the portable handheld device.
It looks like there is a focus right now to continue delivering a device that consumers can already expect what kind of performance the handheld can offer. According to Pierre-Loup Griffais, there is a lot of value for that one spec. Developers understand what to target with the Steam Deck, and consumers will have an idea of its performance level. So right now, it doesn’t look like there are any significant changes to hardware happening, but that could change when the team can expect a real significant gain in performance.
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. 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.
Pierre-Loup Griffais – The Verge
With that said, there are smaller little innovations the folks over at Valve have done with the current Steam Deck. For instance, they have adjusted the adhesive for the battery, which should make replacing it easier for consumers. Additionally, there was an adjustment made to the Delta fans that Valve was using, which caused a bit of a whine. These smaller adjustments should make for a more solid unit. But that’s just it, for now, these are minor adjustments to the current Steam Deck model. You won’t find anything that will give a boost in performance anytime soon. If you want a bit more insight into the Valve Steam Deck, you can check out our Before You Buy video coverage down below.
