Valve Teases VRR And A Battery Life Boost For Steam Deck 2, Dismisses Arms Race
At some point, Valve is going to release a Steam Deck 2 (even if it ends up being called something different). And when it does arrive, it could sport some notable upgrades, including variable refresh rate (VRR) support and longer batter life, compared to the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED. That said, don't expect Valve to engage in an arms race in a hardware category that it helped popularize. As has been pointed out before and now again, Valve is not in a hurry to release an incrementally faster Steam Deck 2.
The folks at Reviews.org spoke with a pair of Steam Deck designers, Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat, who revealed some interesting nuggets about Valve's design philosophy and release strategy. The interview begins by discussing why it took so long to launch in Australia (it's coming in November 2024), which simply boiled down to logistics—setting up a sales channel, putting a system in place to deal with returns, and so forth.
From there, the interview gets more interesting, with the designers waxing strategic on how it views the influx of competition from systems like the ASUS ROG Ally/Ally X and MSI Claw (among several others). The site brought up the topic by calling it an arms race, though Valve doesn't see it that way.
"I wouldn’t characterize it as an arms race," said Yang. "A lot of people are entering the category, which is really exciting for us. When we originally shipped the Steam Deck, our hope was people would see this is a new kind of thing. It’s not a laptop and it’s not a console handheld, but it’s a PC as a handheld. And our hope was that we would be able to kickstart this category and there would be more of them very soon. And that has happened. We’re really excited to see a lot of folks making these kinds of things."
From our vantage point, it doesn't sound as though Yang is being disingenuous. Valve has dabbled in hardware on multiple occasions in efforts to create distinct categories, notably with the Steam Machine initiative that drew in partners like Alienware before largely fizzling out.
The Steam Deck is a different category, and not only has it stuck around, but it's drawn a lot of interesting established PC entities, like Lenovo and Ayaneo, in addition to ASUS and MSI. You can also throw AMD into the mix, with its semi-custom Ryzen Z1 silicon designed specifically for handhelds. Intel too, though Meteor Lake handhelds like the Claw (as well as a Lunar Lake refresh, the Claw 8 AI+) are the exception to the norm.
Given the success of the PC gaming handheld category, one can't help but wonder if Valve sees an opportunity to more aggressively released follow-up models. We see this in other markets, such as smartphones and televisions. But don't expect a new Steam Deck every year.
"It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence," Yang added. "We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better."
Instead, Valve is taking the approach of waiting for a generational leap in compute that doesn't come at the expense of battery life, before it plans on releasing a Steam Deck 2. And to that end, Aldehayyat talked about two things being on Valve's wishlist for a next-gen handheld. Those include VRR support, which is something the company wanted "really badly for the OLED" model but "just couldn't get done on time," and better battery life even though the "general consensus" is that the Steam Deck is "best in its class" in that regard.
Check out the full interview for what else the Steam Deck designers had to say.
