The Steam Deck will not get yearly iterations a la the iPhone, according to one of its designers, though a Steam Deck 2 will likely happen at some point.
In an interview with Reviews.org (spotted by The Verge) Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang said, “We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that.” He elaborated that he felt it was unfair to customers to offer only incremental improvements each year. He said, “…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.”
This answer matches prior statements Valve has made. On several occasions last year, Valve employees stated that a more powerful Steam Deck will be years away–late 2025 at the earliest. Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais explained that part of the Steam Deck brand (at least for now) is that every model can play the same games; Valve doesn’t want to change that until Steam Deck performance gets a significant boost without losing battery life. Later in the interview, Yang did note that Valve is working on a Steam Deck successor.
The Steam Deck did get an upgrade last year in the form of the Steam Deck OLED, which improves battery life and the display quality. The Steam Deck’s popularity has resulted in a variety of competitors, including the Asus ROG Ally, which got SteamOS support in August.
