have already moved toIt’s been just over two years since Valve surprised us with the announcement of the Steam Deck, around July 2021, just over 24 months since the mobile gaming ecosystem has completely changed. Let’s remember that until the announcement, the only high-tech console on the market was the Nintendo Switch, and that the rest of the options were specialized devices and, of course, the all-powerful and ubiquitous smartphones.

However, the arrival of the Steam Deck started the revival of this market, which is very active today, with recent releases like ASUS ROG Ally, Razer Edge, and Logitech G Cloud, and upcoming releases like Lenovo Legion Go and PlayStation Portal. Valve has undoubtedly made a difference, and we can be pretty sure that if it weren’t for such a bold move, the situation today would be very different.

This however It took some of the competitiveness out of Steam DeckNot because Valve’s console has gotten worse, of course, but because it now faces a lot more competition, partly from cloud gaming devices, but mainly from handheld consoles like those from ASUS and Lenovo, which it faces in terms of performance , locally games originally focused on the computer ecosystem.

So it’s conceivable that Valve is already thinking about some kind of refresh for its laptop, and a sign recently appeared that could point in that direction. As we can read in Phoronix, Linux 6.6 contains a mysterious reference to Valve that may be related to the Steam Deck. This version of the kernel is currently under development, so we are talking about a modification-implementation that will come with the deployment of this not-yet-released version of Linux.

Specifically, and grouped under the heading of “Valve Jupiter Devices”, which is not one of the names Valve uses for SteamOS, we see two very interesting items, one that refers to the Sephiroth family and the other that refers to a device identified as Galileo. It sounds cryptic, but one important detail is that Valve refers to the SoC currently used in the Steam Deck as Aerith. And what do Aerith and Sephiroth have in common? Well, they’re both Final Fantasy character names.

So it’s possible that we’re facing a sign of a Steam Deck refresh which would use a new SoC, probably also from AMDalthough there are those who point out that it could also be a virtual reality viewer, and this is something that has been talked about for a long time, since the first rumors about it arose even before Valve started sending the first units to users who they booked them a month ago.