New Steam Deck with improved performance won’t arrive for a few more years

Valve’s Steam Deck handheld console has been on the market for over a year now. Although game consoles do not upgrade every year like phones, players have begun to hope for more powerful models to be released since Steam Deck is a handheld PC game console. However, Valve seems to be very calm and composed, and the latest news indicates that they will not release a new version of Steam Deck in the next few years.

In a recent interview, Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang extinguished players’ expectations for a new machine. He stated that it will be a few years before a more powerful Steam Deck is released, and until then, they will only make small improvements to the new machine so that existing Steam Deck owners will not be left behind. In fact, Valve mentioned this earlier. Last year, they said that they would release a new version with better battery life after Steam Deck, rather than a new machine. In the handheld console market, mid-term small modifications are also a strategy that Nintendo loves to use. Their Switch has been criticized by everyone for not releasing a high-performance version of the “Switch Pro.”

The current Steam Deck is equipped with Valve’s customized Van Gogh APU from AMD, and with the addition of the RDNA 2 architecture GPU, it has good graphics performance in the handheld field. Coupled with the relatively efficient operating environment of Linux, Steam Deck can provide playable frame rates to run AAA games. However, in the past six months, some domestic brands have launched models equipped with AMD Ryzen 6800U, with more CU numbers of the RDNA 2 architecture GPU, which is much more powerful in performance. Of course, Steam Deck has first-party support from the Steam platform, making it have a better user experience than the Windows system.

Currently, Steam Deck’s sales have been consistently among the top on Valve’s own platform sales list, mainly due to last year’s supply difficulties, and many people have not even got their hands on one yet. On a certain e-commerce platform in China, the 64GB version can be purchased for around 3,000 yuan, and many players choose to buy it and modify the large-capacity SSD themselves. Therefore, Steam Deck still has a great value proposition both as a machine itself and as a gaming device.