Valve won’t sacrifice battery life to deliver a more powerful Steam Deck 2

The “real” next generation of handheld PC won’t get here for a while

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

If you’re fondly dreaming of an actual Steam Deck 2, not some half-and-half OLED travesty, you should also be fondly dreaming of a better class of battery. Valve designers Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat have shared a little of the company’s thinking regarding “generational leaps” in hardware, commenting that they don’t want to release a Steam Deck sequel that is “only incrementally better”, and in particular, that they don’t want to release a new Steam Deck that is drastically more powerful at the expense of battery life.

“It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence,” Yang told Reviews.org in an interview to mark the handheld PC’s release in Australia. “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. 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.”

The aforesaid Steam Deck OLED, the pair added, was more of a question of Valve adding features they wish they’d been able to implement for the original Steam Deck. “What we said when we launched the OLED was that this is not a second-generation device,” added Yang. “This is what we would say is what we wish we had shipped originally for Steam Deck [LCD], and I think that has been borne out.”

There are still a few things they’d like to add to the current generation of Steam Deck handhelds. Asked about the competing ROG Ally X’s variable refresh rate display, Aldehayyat acknowledged that “VRR is a thing that we’ve been asked a lot about and I can say that we also wanted it really badly for the OLED ones. We just couldn’t get it done on time. So that’s probably a feature that is on the top of our list of things that we would like to do.” And then there’s the apparently decisive question of battery. “The battery life on Steam Deck, I think there’s a general consensus that’s the best in its class, but I would really love to have it be better,” said Aldehayyat.

If I were hardware editor James Archer, I’d probably have a clever insight at this point about, say, the differing battery capacities of Steam Deck and its competitors, trends in battery tech at large, and the energy footprints and efficiencies of the next generation of processors. Here’s his Steam Deck OLED review for context, in which he notes that “nothing about the Steam Deck OLED has as fundamental an impact on its day-to-day doings as the battery life upgrades.”

The reason I, and not James Archer, am writing this news article is basically that I want to punish James for his fickle lending habits. You see, James very kindly let me borrow one of his own Steam Decks, a few months ago, then very unkindly – viciously, you could argue – asked to have it back again, so that he could “test” something or other.

I’m not sure how many Steam Decks James owns, but I hear he sleeps on a huge pile of them, like a dragon. Me, I have to sleep on a cold, hard bed of bricked Acer netbooks. Still, perhaps when the “real” Steam Deck 2 does roll around James will find it in himself to part with one of the spare OLEDs he otherwise uses to light his cigars. In the meantime, I will be passive-aggressively pinching the odd nugget of hardware news and proudly displaying my ignorance. I don’t even know what “variable refresh rate” means. I assumed they’d just spelt VR wrong.