Valve Confirms Steam Deck 2 Development Is Underway in Status Update

Not only is Valve still planning to launch a next-generation successor to its Steam Deck handheld at some point, but it is "hard at work on it," SteamOS developer and Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told IGN in a recent interview. Even so, don't expect an imminent launch, as Valve is currently focused on its other new hardware launches, including a second iteration of the Steam Controller that is releasing on May 4, a modern Steam Machine reboot, and an all-new Steam Frame.

Unfortunately, Valve is still keeping many of its Steam Deck details close to the vest. There's still no word on exactly when an upgraded handheld will emerge, how much it will cost, or what hardware it will run on. However, Griffais hinted at the Steam Deck 2 largely sticking to its roots.

"We're hard at work on it. And 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. 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 said.

Previously, Griffais had gone on record saying that Valve wants to make sure that the Steam Deck 2 delivers a "worthwhile enough performance upgrade" for it to "make sense as a standalone product." He made that comment back in November 2025, adding that the system-on-chip (SoC) offerings at the time were exciting enough to power a next-generation handheld.

The comment stands out because the refreshed Steam Machine that is inbound is powered by a semi-custom AMD chip with a 6-core/12-thread CPU based on Zen 4 and 28 RNDA 3 compute units. According to Valve, the Steam Machine is over 6x more powerful that the current Steam Deck.

"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 SOC landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck," Griffais said at the time.

Beyond the hardware inside the Steam Deck 2, the other big question mark is when Valve plans to have it ready for release. It could be a while still. While plans can and do change, a popular leaker stated last August that the Steam Deck 2 won't come out until 2028.

Griffais does not get into specific or even vague launch timing in its interview, though he does cover a range of other topics, including the impact of the memory chip shortage and a status update for more broad original Steam Deck availability.