Valve reaffirms the Steam Deck won’t get annual hardware upgrades

First released back in early 2022, the Valve Steam Deck proved to be a massive success for the company, selling millions of units and carving out a new section of the video games market for itself. Despite a hardware upgrade arriving a year later in the form of the Steam Deck OLED, Valve have reiterated the fact that they have no plans to release a new version of the Steam Deck annually.

In an interview conducted by reviews.org, Valve sat down to discuss the upcoming Australian launch of the Steam Deck, in which they reiterated the fact that they do not plan to release a new version of the handheld every year – with designers, Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat stating:

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

Yang continued, “So 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. But it is something that we're excited about and we're working on.”

Since the launch of the Steam Deck, many similar handheld competitors have been released, with the likes of ROG Ally having already seen multiple iterations.

Given just how solid the Steam Deck is – especially the OLED – it makes sense that Valve wouldn’t want to segregate the market so soon after its creation.

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KitGuru says: When do you think Valve will announce the handheld's successor? What would you want from the follow-up system? What’s the best PC handheld available right now in your opinion? Let us know down below.

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