Valve announced the Steam Deck OLED just days ago but the company is already talking about its successor. The Steam Deck’s designer revealed that they are already set to work on a new generation after the release of the OLED variant.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Steam Deck product designer Lawrence Yang reveals that his team is prepping to work on the next-generation handheld. The Steam Deck 2 is expected to arrive in around two to three years with “next-generation” power upgrade but no hardware specifics have been revealed.
The Steam Deck OLED will be arriving next week and features a better screen and battery life. However, there will be no significant upgrade to the hardware. This means that the new Steam Deck will only get display upgrades and not perform any better than the current model.
Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said in September that a faster (or more powerful) Steam Deck won’t be available at least until 2025. According to Griffais, the games that the current and next generation Steam Deck will be the same so Valve isn’t prioritizing a performance upgrade.
Another Steam Deck designer also talked about the potential release date for the Steam Deck 2. Speaking to IGN, Steam Deck designer Jay Shaw said that it will be a while before we see the next generation Steam Deck in the market. Shaw said that Valve is extremely happy with the current generation of handheld but the new console is also top of mind.
“I don’t know. It’ll be a while,” Shaw shared. “I think it’ll be quite a while. We don’t have any kind of set date. I think we’re going to wait for the technology to present itself in a way that we find interesting and for the team to really want to make that leap. We’re very, very, very proud of this version of Steam Deck and this is it. This is the one that we’re the most happy with and we think customers will be too.”
“So we’re thinking about Steam Deck 2 at all times, but I think we’re so satisfied here that this is really the kind of high end of what we wanted to do.”
The Steam Deck OLED has two storage configurations: 512GB and 1TB. The 512GB will cost $549 while the 1TB variant is priced at $649. Similar to the original version, the OLED model will have a microSD card slot. Pre-orders for the Steam Deck OLED starts next week.
