Steam Deck 2 was officially confirmed from Valve last September, but it would take a while to arrive. Last Friday, Lawrence Yang, the user experience designer at Valve, again openly admitted in an interview that they are working on this project and that they want this next-gen model to become a worthy successor.

It’s an important comment that makes all the sense in the world because as we know the Steam Deck was a huge success and therefore its successor has to live up to it, which of course can be quite tricky because It’s not just about installing more powerful hardwareyou also have to take care of other details such as interface, control system, screen quality and optimization at the operating system level.

In this interview, Yang also explained why Steam Deck 2 will take two to three years to launch and the reason is very easy to understand, because they need to make a significant leap in performance level and because it’s no good having a wide variety of models on the market that only improve between 10% and 30%. All this complicates things for developers, as they have to do harder work at the optimization level, focusing on different configurations.

Yazan Aldehayyat, a hardware engineer at Valve, also noted that the team is also listening to the community and learn from the successes and mistakes they made with the current modelmeaning that Steam Deck 2 could reuse many things from the original model and that it could also bring important changes in design and ergonomics in other aspects such as the control system and the screen.

Both Valve employees believe it will be necessary to wait at least two to three years for a sufficiently powerful APU to reach the market give life to that Steam Deck 2. It doesn’t mean we won’t see more powerful chips in shorter cycle times, in fact we already have a Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU that clearly outperforms the solution used by Steam Deck, but they refer a sufficiently large generational leap in order to justify launching a successor.

With all of this in mind, it’s clear that the launch of Steam Deck 2 will take place between 2025 and 2026. To make the wait more pleasant, Valve has launched the Steam Deck OLED, an improved version of the current model that retains its design keys and uses the same APU, meaning it offers the same level of performance. The most important differences it presents are in its screen, which it will become an OLED type and have a size of 7.4 inches and a storage capacity, as it is available in 512 GB and 1 TB configurations.