If you recently got a Steam Deck and can’t get enough of it, prepare to keep using it for a while.
Valve’s handheld PC gaming powerhouse was one of the best tech launches of 2022, so naturally, people want to know what’s next. In a wide-ranging interview with The Verge(opens in a new tab), Steam Deck designers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Lawrence Yang gave implicit confirmation of what’s not coming anytime soon: A Steam Deck Pro.
More specifically, don’t expect an upgraded Steam Deck Pro with slightly better horsepower in the near future. While Valve plans on making a follow-up to the Steam Deck at some point, Griffais told The Verge that the company likes having every user at the same level of technical capability for the time being.
“Right now the fact that all the Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one target for users to understand what kind of performance level to expect when you’re playing and for developers to understand what to target... there’s a lot of value in having that one spec,” Griffais told The Verge.
That said, Yang and Griffais did say they want to eventually improve the Steam Deck’s display and battery life. The latter aspect is, in particular, something that could use a lot of work. It’s possible to drain a Steam Deck’s battery in 90 minutes or less, depending on what you do with it.
But if display and battery improvements come along, don’t expect them to be married to a small, incremental change in horsepower. We’ll likely get a Steam Deck 2 rather than a Steam Deck Pro.
