For more than a year, the development of Steam Deck 2 as the second generation of Valve’s game engine has been talked about. And everything indicates that we will have to wait because the company says it’s not interested in the near-annual update race that other competitors are betting on.

This was explained again by one of the machine’s designers, Lawrence Yang, in a promotional interview on the occasion of its launch in Australia, where he assured that they would not release the new model until they could offer “generational leap” in performance and in addition without sacrificing battery lifea difficult balance to achieve that is clearly penalized in some major models.

Steam Deck 2, delayed?

The Valve machine is largely responsible for the current interest in the segment of handheld gaming machines and for major manufacturers such as ASUS, Lenovo or MSI entered a market with great potential. A winning horse for enough hardware; fairly reasonable price; A very capable operating system and the potential of the world’s leading digital gaming platform have been able to create a very successful ecosystem. But it’s not perfect and we’ve already posted that 10 new features we’d like to see in Steam Deck 2.

Although the passage of time is noticeable on any electronic device, Valve is in no rush to update and even welcomes alternatives: “We are very excited to see many people making these types of machines. And they’re making interesting design decisions and trying different things to differentiate themselves, whether it’s input, performance, or display. It’s really cool and we think it’s something very typical of the PC ecosystem. We don’t believe there has to be only Deck; There is room for many other things.”.

Despite this, a Valve engineer says he’s not interested in the constant update approach: «It’s important to us and we tried to make it very clear: we’re not going to introduce a yearly cadence.”Yang said. “We will not launch a new model every year. There’s no reason to do that. And honestly, from our point of view, It’s not fair to customers to release something so soon that it only gets progressively better.. So we really want to wait for a generational leap in computing without sacrificing battery life before launching a true second generation Steam Deck. But it’s something we’re excited about and working on.”.

And when would this generational leap occur? The timing remains uncertain, but there are some potential clues coming from AMD’s Zen 5 architecture and chips like the Ryzen Z2.

And not just hardware

It must be said that Valve’s ambitions extend beyond hardware. The company is taking steps to improve the gaming experience regular Steam Deck owners and potentially the PC gaming community as a whole. For example, the Arch Linux team recently announced a collaboration with Valve to optimize the distribution that powers SteamOS.

In addition, Valve seems interested in expanding the reach of SteamOS to gain more support from developers, with hints that a general release of SteamOS (for machines outside of the official Steam Deck) could be in the works.