Valve has no news about Steam Deck 2 — because it’s still waiting for the right chip

Valve has just announced its biggest hardware push that it’s arguably ever made — a living room game console called the Steam Machine, a headset called the Steam Frame, and the long-awaited sequel to its Steam Controller it hinted about three years back.

But Valve won’t say the first word about its next gaming handheld, the Steam Deck 2.

“Steam Deck is not what we’re here to talk about today,” Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told us at the very beginning of our briefing. “It’s sort of related but not really,” he said, before launching into a discussion of how the Steam Deck’s learnings underpinned every new product that it’s announcing today.

The company wouldn’t tell us if the new drift-resistant TMR joysticks it’s introducing in the Steam Controller and Steam Frame’s wands will make it into a future Steam Deck, either. “We’re always thinking about Steam Deck and ways to improve it in the future,” says Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali when I ask. (He also says Valve currently has no plans to offer the TMR joysticks as a drop-in module for the original Deck.)

Why no news? IGN discovered one reason: Valve still hasn’t found the right chip.

While Valve has repeatedly confirmed that the Steam Deck will have sequels, the company’s also repeatedly been clear that it’s in no hurry to bring them to market. Since 2022, Griffais has consistently told us that Valve wants to see a significant leap in performance and efficiency before it takes the plunge. “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,” is how Valve’s Lawrence Yang concisely reiterated it to Reviews.org in 2024.

But right now, “there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SOC landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck,” Griffais tells IGN.

“We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that,” he says.

The question now is: Will Valve find that leap in performance and efficiency from x86? Because while Valve initially thought its standalone VR headset might run on the existing Steam Deck’s chip, the company just announced the Steam Frame with an Arm processor instead — using emulation to let it play some Windows games locally on the headset. Griffais tells me he thinks Arm has “a lot of potential” in future handhelds someday.

Valve tells us the Frame has a lower performance target than the nearly four-year-old Steam Deck, so it would need a far more potent Arm chip to power such a handheld. Qualcomm, in particular, has been working on Arm chips for handhelds, though, and one of its customers for the latest was even interested in discussing a possible SteamOS handheld with Valve.

None of that necessarily means you should expect an Arm-based Steam Deck 2 just yet, though.

Update, November 11th: Added IGN’s chat with Griffais.