I love my Steam Deck, as any regular reader will know. It's my favourite gaming device but it could always be better right? And with competition hot (hi Nintendo), I hope Valve have more plans.
Now, I'm not dumb enough to think that the Steam Deck is in actual competition with the Nintendo Switch. That's just not a reality. The Switch has sold over 140 million units and continues to sell millions, it's in stores everywhere, people buy it for their children, for themselves and yeah — you get the idea. But still, for us PC fans the Steam Deck (and specifically us Linux lot) and other PC handhelds are simply awesome.
We all knew a Nintendo Switch 2 would happen, there just hadn't been any real proper confirmation, until now. Writing on social media, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa posted on May 7th:
This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.
So sometime before the end of March 2025, the Nintendo Switch 2 will be revealed.
That leads me to think about the future. The Switch 2 will no doubt sell by the truck-loads once again. So let's just set that aside because it's a different market overall. Still, we have other handheld PC gaming vendors appearing often like the ROG Ally, Legion GO, MSI Claw, various devices from OneXPlayer, GPD, Ayaneo and more on the way so there's really a lot of these devices now.
To me, handheld gaming like this is the future. You may think I am heavily biased, and in many ways I am (obviously, I run this website) but I'm a tech-fan. I have a PlayStation, a Switch, an Xbox and more. But it feels increasingly weird to have a dedicated solid box permanently attached to a single TV. I actually don't like that at all now. Being able to take a much smaller device with you to play anywhere, and additionally have the ability to hook it up to a TV whenever you want just feels so much better. Nintendo definitely had the right idea, as did Valve.
We've seen in the past that Valve have said pretty clearly they had plans to keep going, and with the Steam Deck still continuing to sell constantly, it would be crazy if Valve didn't produce a Steam Deck 2. Even though you could argue the Steam Deck OLED is such a ridiculous improvement it might as well be a Steam Deck 2, I want more. A lot more.
The current shell design is just fine, I don't think Valve really need to do many changes there at all. The OLED design gave us enough improvements inside to various parts so thinking on what they should add in for the big number 2: a newer generation AMD APU to bring performance up, with a slightly higher resolution screen and I honestly think I would be ridiculously happy. It doesn't take much. Performance being the biggest one and with more new AMD chips on the way, give it another year for the generation after that (or their refresh) and we could be looking at a really fun performance boost.
So, let's say a Steam Deck 2 announcement in late 2026. Make it so, Valve.
What do you think? And what do you now want from a Steam Deck 2?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The current design of the shell / controller / etc is perfect for me. Just needs a faster cpu/gpu and for the screen to keep getting better over the years.
* Very slightly smaller/lighter/thinner
* Another 30% battery life bump
* 6-8 cores (no need to go above 8) that's very power optimized.
* Stick to the Radeon iGPU platform (as they have lots of software for it) so probably an RDNA4 20CU setup
* Bump to 256-bit RAM (or 192bit + some kind of big cache)
* Reduce the power consumption of uncore significantly, so online idle power can be brought down to the 1W range.
* Screen can stay the same, maybe eDP with VFR.
Basically, incremental improvements in form factor, focus more on power efficiency and a wide-and-slow CPU/GPU with ample compute and bandwidth so it doesn't starve itself like e.g. Phoenix APU's do.
They could also release a small home version that's meant to be hooked up to a TV with no screen or battery for a lower price, but I understand that would put them in an apples to apples situation compared to other home consoles and small gaming PC's and Valve might want to stay differentiated by maintaining the handheld form factor.
The benefits of a standardized hardware target are negated by too frequent changes. Being able to test for one configuration is important for devs, it is often cited as a benefit of consoles over PC, and the Deck was dealing with that nicely while also being a PC.
Sure every year we get new hardware (which is a problem: e-waste is getting out of hand, short-lived devices use more energy being manufactured than through their entire lifetime, we rely more and more on minerals that are environmentally and socially costly to extract, etc etc). The increases in performance are often marginal or come at a cost, such as lower battery life or bigger devices (phones have been steadily creeping in size, to the dismay of many people, to keep up with an artificial improvement in specs, and GPUs are ridiculously large). Costs of game development have also been increasing unreasonably. Following these frequent updates is a bad thing.
And honestly, it pisses me off immensely when people make new generations of a product that hasn't even made it into the whole world yet. Finish releasing it in all the other countries before thinking of replacing it.
The 8 year cadence of the switch is too long as it has definitely been losing developer interest in the last two years as it's too weak to support on multiplatform releases anymore.
Quoting: grigiWhat do you think is a good cadence for updates? 3 years? 4 years? more?It's far too long, the Switch was low-powered even at release and it has missed a fair amount of games as it's just not strong enough.
The 8 year cadence of the switch is too long as it has definitely been losing developer interest in the last two years as it's too weak to support on multiplatform releases anymore.
For the Deck 2, my suggestion there about announcing it late 2026, would mean a release in 2027. Making it about 5 years between Deck and Deck 2 which for a PC platform seems pretty darn reasonable to me, considering the Deck struggles a lot with newer games right now.
Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: grigiWhat do you think is a good cadence for updates? 3 years? 4 years? more?It's far too long, the Switch was low-powered even at release and it has missed a fair amount of games as it's just not strong enough.
The 8 year cadence of the switch is too long as it has definitely been losing developer interest in the last two years as it's too weak to support on multiplatform releases anymore.
For the Deck 2, my suggestion there about announcing it late 2026, would mean a release in 2027. Making it about 5 years between Deck and Deck 2 which for a PC platform seems pretty darn reasonable to me, considering the Deck struggles a lot with newer games right now.
Hmm, but the gamble Valve took was minimised with Deck 1. I'm sure I read that they had to reserve a minimum of 2 million chips for a custom design, and that they were thinking there's no way we'll sell that many.
Likely that's why the Deck OLED came out so soon after as they ran out of their initial order and it was a similar cost to do an updated node.
Now with Deck 2 they can push a little harder if they aim to sell, e.g. 10 million of em. So instead of tacking on last-gen CPU cores to a current gen GPU, they could get more modern things.
So I'm thinking that the first generation cadence would make sense to be a little shorter, as there are already games where the Deck struggles.
So would be happy if they announce the next version end of next year for 2026 release.
QuoteAnd what do you now want from a Steam Deck 2?
A lot of the failings of the first-gen Deck got fixed with the OLED - the bezels got reduced, the battery life got improved, L1/R1 got less janky, the not-great display got swapped, the too-small 64 GB SKU got dropped, and the power LED has status colours.
There are still remaining improvements that can be made, though, so I'd like
- enough performance to run 2026-current and near-future AAA games at native resolution at 30 fps or higher
- OLED for every SKU
- stacked cache on the APU for more effective bandwidth
- any magical new-fangled battery tech that lets you fit more battery inside.
- additional intake vents along the bottom edge so that neither "propped in lap" nor "balanced on a sofa arm" will completely starve the cooling of air
- a Kensington slot. If the Deck becomes the de facto machine to leave at trade shows or hand out to focus groups, then "the machine that my in-development game absolutely has to run well on" is the Deck
- further improved L1/R1 buttons, and potentially make those analogue
- have some means, either tactile or backlight, to find the supplemental buttons.
- since both "game developers don't test below 1080p" and "this game is only Playable rather than Verified because the text is too small" are both things, a size bump to 8½-9 inches and a resolution bump to 1920×1200 if they can get that to meet the performance requirements
- a kickstand, or a prop solution that comes in the box, since external controller support is already good.
- sticky strips instead of glue, and maintaining or improving the deconstruction process
Whether it will need a RAM bump and a storage bump is hard to say right now, but it seems like it might. Streaming-to-Deck and shopping-on-Deck need work already, but they'll want to fix up both of those before a Deck 2 is released.
Last edited by CatKiller on 8 May 2024 at 2:58 pm UTC
Quoting: eldakingIt is far too early to release a Deck 2
Why? Desktop generation of CPUs and GPUs refresh around once per 2 years. Same happens with mobile phones. Why can't gaming handhelds refresh that way too?
Quoting: eldakinghe benefits of a standardized hardware target are negated by too frequent changes
That somehow doesn't bother desktop gaming.
Waste can be an issue, but you aren't forced to buy new hardware every time there is a generation update.
Last edited by Shmerl on 8 May 2024 at 3:02 pm UTC
pleasereadthemanual May 8
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me