Valve is still figuring out ‘how and when’ to do Steam Deck 2

Don’t expect a Steam Deck sequel soon.

Sean Hollister

Sep 15, 2026, 12:13 AM UTC

Photo: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Part OfSteam Deck, ROG Ally, and more: all the news about the handheld PC gaming revolutionsee all updates

Sean Hollister

is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Now that Valve has finally launched its entire 2026 hardware lineup — theSteam Controller, theSteam Machine, andtoday’s Steam Frame— are we any closer to a next-gen Steam Deck handheld? Valve isn’t saying so yet. The company is figuring out “how and when we can deliver something like that,” Valve designer Pierre-Loup Griffaisnow tellsIGN.

Valve has been clear for years that 1)a Steam Deck 2 will indeed happen, and 2) it’s not cominguntil Valve finds the right chip. The original Steam Deck worked because it deliveredthe right combinationof price, performance, and battery life, and Valve has repeatedly said it won’t sacrifice efficiency in the sequel.

“We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life,” Griffaistold me in 2023, saying he wanted to see a “leap” instead — but suggesting that leap might not be physically possible for another couple of years.

Earlier this year, Valve got my hopes up that the wait for a chip was over — when Griffais revealed the team was “hard at work” on the next Steam Deck gaming handheld inan interview withIGN. He wouldn’t say when it might happen. I assumed that was caution, because RAMageddon had already pushed the company todelay and reprice the Steam Machine and Steam Frame headsetby then.

Today, IGN’s new question was: “Has the current hardware shortage impacted the way Valve is thinking about actually putting a Steam Deck 2 into development?” Griffais’ immediate answer was “Not really.”

That could be good news for impatient gamers — or it could mean that the company willwait out RAMageddonbefore it dares intercept the silicon supply chain again. Valve originally wanted to builda “far more affordable” headset, for instance, but instead it facedbrutal RAM negotiationsto eventually arrive at a $1,059 pricetag.

The real question is: has Valve yet identified the future chip that will appear in the Steam Deck 2? Because the company will work backwards from that chip’s availability to create the hardware it lives within.

Intel’s Panther Lake handheld chip in the MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus isthe first I’ve tried that comes closeto the kind of “generational leap” that Griffais has been talking about, but Panther Lake handhelds are incredibly expensive, and the Intel chip wasn’t a silver bullet in my tests. But I bet Valve has seen the future of Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm chips, and maybe a future one will do the trick.

I hope a Steam Deck 2 will kickstart a newgolden age of handheld gaming; I fear it may cost too much for that.

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