Valve is still developing the successor to the Steam Deck, while also trying to overcome stock shortages for the original.
That’s according to Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais, who told IGN in a new interview that work on the Steam Deck 2 is continuing.
“We’re hard at work on it,” Griffais said, stating that when Steam Deck 2 does eventually release it will be a natural progression of the other Steam hardware released before it.
“Obviously every step of the way, if you look at our harder projects over the years, you can draw a straight line from original Steam Controller and Steam Machines to Steam Deck to everything that we’re announcing and shipping this year,” he said. “And we expect Steam Deck to will be a lot of the same where a lot of what we’re doing here will be learnings that build up to it.”
Griffais was also asked about the original Steam Deck, which has been in extremely short supply in the US for a number of months now, with Valve warning back in February that it may be a regular occurrence due to RAM and storage shortages.
“We don’t really have any specific details to share about that, but it’s something we’re working hard on,” Griffais explained. “And as you are aware, there’s a lot of considerations right now with respect to shipping being difficult, and also memory shortages and all that.
“So we’ve been trying to work through that because we are very cognizant of the fact that there’s folks that want to get Steam Deck and they’re not currently able to get it. It’s available in some regions right now, but in general, it’s something that we’re working very hard on.”
Noting that the RAM shortage affects not only the Steam Deck but also the upcoming Steam Machine, Griffais said the company was doing its best to secure parts but stressed that this is a worldwide issue and there are therefore only so many options available to Valve.
“We’re trying to make sure to keep options open and to work with as many different manufacturers as we can,” he said. “I think in general, that’s something that we’re doing throughout our hardware design and production phase where we’re always cognizant of the fact that having a single source for a given part would put us downstream of potential shortages, and things like that in a way that affects the continuity of the supply and the price for end users.
“So from the get-go, we’ve been trying to make sure that we have many options there, and that’s been proving really useful in this kind of climate, because we can work with all the big players and some of the smaller ones as well.
“That being said, the conditions around memory are pretty global right now, so there’s only so much that we can do. But for example, there was a similar condition during the COVID times where there’s a microcontroller shortage and people couldn’t really build anything that had small chips. So every sector from automotive to consumer PCs was affected by that.
“And because we had so many different options open in terms of putting different types of microcontrollers in there, we were able to navigate that and keep some supply in a climate where maybe some other players were not able to do that. So we expect to be navigating the memory thing the same way.”
Last year Griffais said Valve has an idea of what the Steam Deck 2 will be capable of, but that the hardware isn’t ready yet.
“The thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product,” he explained. “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.
“So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.”
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