Valve
The Steam Deck won’t get a more powerful version soon, according to Valve
Players still weighing whether to get a Steam Deck now or wait for a possible “Pro” version can rest easy since Valve discards the idea of more powerful hardware in the immediate future.
Valve designer Lawrence Yang has revealed that it will be “a few years” before the company releases a more powerful version of the Steam Deck to the public.
During a recent interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Yang and engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais (who recently revealed they added ray tracing to Doom Eternal on the device) spoke about the performance of the Steam Deck after a year of its launch. With over 8,000 titles from the Steam Store officially rated as Playable or Verified by the company’s internal compatibility program, the device came packed with many more titles than almost any other console on the market today. Ranging from small indie games to AAA titles like Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus, and even Sony’s God of War (2018), its enormous library is awe-inspiring.
Griffais revealed that they believe the Steam Deck “has the potential to be a solid target throughout the generation.” However, it seems like the work involved in allowing for this is more complex than simple software upgrades and Deck UX tweaks from the developers’ side. Yang then stated a more powerful version of the Deck won’t really be seen in the next couple of years.
“We've seen a number of recently released demanding titles perform well on Steam Deck,” Yang continued, “due to developers targeting and testing on the device. We've also seen a very positive response from customers when titles are Deck Verified or Playable, which has been great to see." As it stands, with the right settings some of the year’s most demanding titles are still playable at reasonably high quality in the handheld device, so its no surprise that a hardware upgrade would be out of the question so soon into the Deck’s life cycle.
Does this mean that Valve has no plan to upgrade the hardware at all? It would be fair to suppose that smaller upgrades to the system could be planned for the near future, like a larger battery or improved thermals, but we wouldn’t bet on the company announcing a “Steam Deck Pro” or “Deck 2” yet.
Source | Rock Paper Shotgun