A More Powerful Steam Deck Is Years Away, Valve Says

It appears that Valve is in no rush to release a more powerful version of its Steam Deck just yet. Currently, the Steam Deck can run over 8,000 games spanning indie titles to more hardware-intense games such as Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077.

In a recent interview, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told Rock, Paper, Shotgun that he believes that the Steam “Deck has the potential to be a solid target throughout the generation.” Griffais then explains how Valve plans to improve Steam Decks specs “but the work involved is trickier than the typical Deck UX tweaks developers have had to do for games that already perform well.”

In the same interview, Valve designer Lawrence Yang echoes Griffai’s thoughts on the Steam Deck’s longevity by explaining how he feels that “a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn’t be for a few years.” This makes sense because the Steam Deck has only been out for a little over a year.

Throughout its first year of being out in the wild, it’s received several updates improving its quality of life. The most recent one enables ray tracing on Doom Eternal and fixes graphical corruption problems in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and GPU crashes in unspecified upcoming games.