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Valve has a habit of dropping a lot of promising projects. We've yet to see any iteration on the Valve Index, nor have we seen a new VR title from Valve since the release of Half-Life: Alyx. Artifact was rebooted and then dropped after the developers proclaimed they were in it for ‘the long haul'. The Steam Link and Steam Controller were both released and then dropped within a few years. However, the Steam Deck appears to be so popular that Valve is intending to keep the product line around for generations to come.
A new Steam Deck booklet has been found by GamingOnLinux (via VGC), which contains a few interesting quotes. In the booklet, Valve says that the Steam Deck “represents the first in a new category of Steam handheld gaming PCs”. Moving forward, Valve will “follow up on this product with improvements and iterations to hardware and software, bringing new versions of the Steam Deck to market”.
Those quotes do make it sound like Valve might just be describing typical manufacturer revisions, which happen over time for pretty much all mass-produced hardware, including traditional consoles like Xbox and PlayStation. However, elsewhere, Valve also refers to the Deck as a “multi-generational product line”, which indicates that there will be a ‘Deck 2' or something along those lines with more powerful hardware under the hood.
The Steam Deck is currently at its most popular point since launch. Positive impressions from early adopters have led to another surge in reservations. With that in mind, we wouldn't expect a significantly upgraded Deck anytime soon, but perhaps in a couple more years time, Valve will start to look at more up to date APUs for the next generation of Deck systems.
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KitGuru Says: The real trick here is going to be getting the timing right. AMD is always working on new hardware and Zen 4 CPUs and RDNA 3 GPUs are just around the corner. However If Valve were to launch a new, more powerful Steam Deck in 2023, chances are you would annoy a lot of the people that spent months waiting to get the original model in 2022.
