After announcing the Steam Controller’s release date, Valve has provided a small update on the status of Steam Deck 2. While the company remains coy about any potential launch plans, Valve says its upcoming hardware offerings should provide glimpses of what’s to come.
When asked about Steam Deck 2 by IGN, Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais succinctly said that “we’re hard at work on it.” While he didn’t offer any specifics about whether Steam Deck 2 is already far into its development process or not, he highlighted how the ill-fated original Steam Controller and Steam Machines directly influenced the company’s current and upcoming hardware.
“If you look at our hardware projects over the years, you can draw a straight line from the original Steam Controller and Steam Machine to Steam Deck, to everything that we’re announcing and shipping this year. And we expect Steam Deck 2 will be a lot of the same where a lot of what we’re doing here will be learnings that build up to it.”
You can already see clear throughlines from Steam Deck to the Steam Controller, with the latter sharing much of its design and feature set with Valve’s handheld. This is to say nothing of the progress the company has made in getting Linux to play well with gaming through Proton, making the console-like Steam Machine even remotely possible. One can’t forget the transition from Index to Steam Frame too.
Some leakers estimate that the Steam Deck 2 launch window could fall sometime in 2028, as long as DRAM and SSD prices settle. However, Valve has made clear it doesn’t want to launch a new system without substantial performance improvements at the same battery life, in the region of >50% at least.
While Ryzen Z2 Extreme handhelds, such as the MSI Claw A8, are undeniably faster than Steam Deck, I don’t think these AMD SoCs will quite fit Valve’s criteria in terms of efficiency and cost, even with a few years behind it. I think it’s far more likely we’ll see a custom chip built in collaboration with AMD, perhaps providing FSR 4.1 support and other quality-of-life features.
While we probably still have a long wait ahead of us for the Steam Deck 2, Griffais’ comments also reiterate that the Steam Machine and Frame are still on track to launch this year. Here’s hoping they’re not massively behind the Steam Controller, which launches May 8.
