Steam Deck won’t have yearly refreshes because it’s “not really fair to your customers”, says Valve

Valve won’t be releasing a new Steam Deck console each year because “that’s kind of not really fair to your customers”.

The handheld PC device will finally be available to purchase in Australia in November. Two of its designers from Valve, Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat, were interviewed by Reviews.org and discussed the trend of yearly hardware refreshes.

“It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence,” said Yang. “We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better.

“So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.”

Valve first released the Steam Deck in North America and Europe in 2022, which was followed by the OLED model in 2023.

While a Steam Deck 2 is in development, Valve told Eurogamer last year – ahead of the OLED release – that the technology does not yet exist.

“Obviously we’d love to get even more performance in the same power envelope, but that technology doesn’t exist yet,” said Aldehayyat. “That’s what I think we’d call a Steam Deck 2.0.

“The first Steam Deck was the first moment in time where we felt like there was enough GPU performance in a portable form factor that lets you play all your Steam games. We would love for the trend of perf-per-watt to progress rapidly to do that, but it’s not quite there yet.”

It’s certainly an interesting take from the company, considering Sony’s forthcoming PS5 Pro. It costs £700 and includes an upgraded GPU among other features, though the improvements are incremental.

If you’d like to see the PS5 Pro in action, Digital Foundry has clips of The Last of Us Part 2 and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.