The Steam Deck is great, and according to the mostly positive reviews, everyone who has one loves it. That’s a good thing because it might be a while before there’s another one.
In an email to The Verge, Valve employee Pierre-Loup Griffais said that the next Steam Deck won’t be available for at least a “couple of years,” unless something changes drastically about the portable PC hardware landscape. To be more specific, Griffais said Valve doesn’t want to upgrade the Steam Deck’s specs unless they can deliver an uptick in performance without compromising the device’s battery life.
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Anyone who’s ever used a Steam Deck likely understands that concern on a deep level. The portable gaming PC as it exists now dies after roughly two to three hours of use depending on the kinds of games you play. And that’s with the caveat that it isn’t especially powerful by PC standards. Big games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield are known to run poorly on Steam Deck — unless you turn the graphical settings way down.
Griffais also insinuated that the appeal of the Steam Deck is that it can play most games that run on a traditional console. As such, developing and testing games for a popular device is a lot easier when you know the performance capabilities of the device. Valve iterating on the Steam Deck every 18 months would make the development process too frustrating for game creators.
In other words, there’s a reason they only make a new PlayStation and Xbox every seven years. Steam Deck is great, but not great enough to escape that reality.
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