While Valve’s Steam Deck portable gaming PC is wildly popular, the company has doubled down on not releasing regular updates to the hardware.
A new interview with Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang has confirmed that Valve won’t be releasing updates to the hardware with minor improvements, but that they want to wait for a “generational leap” in computing power before releasing a new Steam Deck.
“It is important to us, and we have tried to be very clear, that we are not doing the annual cadence,” Yang told Reviews.org. “We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And honestly, from our perspective, it’s not really fair to your customers to quickly come up with something that’s just incrementally better.”
He added: “So we really want to wait for a generational leap in computing power without sacrificing battery life before releasing the true second-generation Steam Deck. But it is something we are excited about and working on.”
Yang’s commitment to waiting for seriously upgraded hardware before releasing a new Steam Deck echoes previous statements from the company. Furthermore, the OLED variant was released shortly after the original LCD version, although it had no tangible hardware upgrades other than the display.
Despite not committing to a new Steam Deck model in the near future, Yang did confirm later in the interview that Valve is obviously working on a new Steam Deck successor. Competitors like Asus have released their own version of the Steam Deck and even Microsoft is reportedly making their own handheld.
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