Valve promises constant Steam Deck revisions won’t happen to keep things “fair to customers”

Following the release of the Steam Deck OLED, some fans of Valve’s handheld PC expected frequent hardware refreshes of the device. However, Valve has promised fans that it won’t be releasing constant updates for its popular machine as its not fair to fans.

No Steam Deck year updates

In an interview by Reviews.org, Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehhayyat explained that the company doesn’t want to continue making minor revisions for the machine. As the designers explained, “there’s no reason to do that” to fans.

“It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence,” Yang promised. “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.”

Continuing this idea, Yang explained that Steam Deck 2 won’t arrive until there’s a considerable leap in hardware arrives. When this happens, and the next-gen hardware can offer a significant leap while keeping battery life healthy.

“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,” they explained. “But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.”

No new models?

At the time of writing, there’s currently two SKUs for Valve’s Steam Deck—an LCD model and an OLED mode. With the OLED model released in 2023, there’s currently no revealed plans for any newer versions of the hardware.

Nevertheless, Valve could be working on newer refreshes of the system for the future. In the future, there could be a slimmer version of the hardware or a slightly different version in the coming years, but nothing is confirmed.