Development of Valve’s next-gen Steam Deck handheld hasn’t been impacted by sky-high RAM prices and hardware shortages, according to the company. Both the Steam Machine and Steam Frame have recently launched at considerably higher prices than previously expected, due to highly inflated DRAM and storage costs, but Valve says it’s still looking at the Steam Deck successor “in the same way” as before.
Speaking to game news site IGN, Valve software developer Pierre-Loup Griffais was asked if today’s hardware shortage had affected the Steam Deck 2’s development plans. “Not really,” replied Griffais, adding that “we want to make sure there’s a very delineated performance improvement for something like a future Steam Deck.”
Otherwise, development is still business as usual. “We’re working back from the user experience,” says Griffais, explaining Valve’s priorities when it comes to hardware, where the easy usability of SteamOS gives the company a big advantage over firms making Windows-based handhelds.
According to Griffais, responding to the current hardware shortage is “just a matter of looking at the current conditions and seeing how and when we can deliver something like that.” A Steam Deck 2 would undoubtedly be affected by current RAM and storage prices if it launched any time soon, as we’ve seen with Valve’s other key hardware launches this year. However, Griffais adds some context here, pointing out that its gear is following the same pricing trends as competitive kit.
“If you look at the memory and anything that has a similar amount of memory, it’s kind of trending the same direction,” Griffais says about the Steam Frame, “and Steam Machine is not really getting more expensive than a comparable PC. They’re kind of evolving at the same spot in the same market, and I think the same will apply to the Frame as well.”
Valve has so far been tight-lipped about specs for future handheld designs, but Griffais has previously said that Valve is “hard at work” on a Steam Deck successor, explaining that it wants to see more than a 50% boost in performance over the original Deck, while maintaining the same battery life.
There’s still a lot of love for the Steam Deck out there, despite its ageing hardware compared to the latest competition, as its handheld-optimised OS, physical design, and mature storefront all help it stand out from the crowd. However, it’s difficult to justify buying one now at current Steam Deck prices, given the limited Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU used in its silicon. Let’s hope that Griffais’ comments about a “delineated performance improvement” are accurate, even if the next-gen handheld will undoubtedly have a high price.
