Valve remains to be determining ‘how and when’ to do Steam Deck 2

Now that Valve has lastly launched its complete 2026 {hardware} lineup — the Steam Controller, the Steam Machine, and in the present day’s Steam Frame — are we any nearer to a next-gen Steam Deck handheld? Valve isn’t saying so but. The firm is determining “how and when we can deliver something like that,” Valve designer Pierre-Loup Griffais now tells IGN.

“We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life,” Griffais informed me in 2023, saying he needed to see a “leap” as an alternative — however suggesting that leap won’t be bodily doable for one more couple of years.

Today, IGN’s new query was: “Has the current hardware shortage impacted the way Valve is thinking about actually putting a Steam Deck 2 into development?” Griffais’ rapid reply was “Not really.”

The actual query is: has Valve but recognized the longer term chip that may seem within the Steam Deck 2? Because the corporate will work backwards from that chip’s availability to create the {hardware} it lives inside.

Intel’s Panther Lake handheld chip within the MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus is the primary I’ve tried that comes near the sort of “generational leap” that Griffais has been speaking about, however Panther Lake handhelds are extremely costly, and the Intel chip wasn’t a silver bullet in my exams. But I guess Valve has seen the way forward for Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm chips, and perhaps a future one will do the trick.