Steam Deck 2 Is Coming, But A Pro Model Unlikely: Valve

Steam Deck is one of the best-selling consoles of 2022 and has won multiple awards. Thanks to its popularity and excellent price-to-performance ratio. It is a first gen product; hence, it’s only normal for people to raise their expectations and have lots of questions about what’s coming next.

Luckily for us, The Verge’s Sean Hollister recently interviewed Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais and asked some of the burning questions, in which they revealed Steam Deck 2 is coming, but a pro model isn’t happening anytime soon.

They also revealed that they want to make a Steam Controller 2.

I think it’s likely that we’ll explore that because it’s something we want as well. Right now, we’re focusing on the Deck, so it’s a little bit of the same thing as the microconsole question: it’s definitely something where we’d be excited to work with a third-party or explore ourselves.

Griffais

Stability? Pff!

Speaking about hardware, Pierre-Loup Griffais said the Steam Deck might never be stable. I don’t think you should expect that,” says Griffais. “Stable in terms of having a great experience for people? Yeah, absolutely. I think we are always going to be pushing updates as long as there are people playing.”

Yang said that there are “things we want to fix and things we still want to make. The bug list grows as more people get Steam Deck, and we get more feedback about things — and the feature list kind of stays the same size because as we add features, we get more features we want to add based on our own experience and what we’re hearing from customers.”

Making the Steam Deck more repairable

The talk about repairability was also spurred, and they were asked about iFixit’s decision to lower the repairability score because the battery is very hard to replace. Here’s what Grifaais said.

I believe you always need some extra room around the battery to account for possible battery expansion in any design, right? Because of that, you can’t really have the battery-shaped hole where it goes into the case be exactly the same size as the battery, and so for that reason there’s always a risk that if it’s not fastened properly, it will be rattling around or shifting. And because it’s a very heavy component with respect to the rest of the Deck, it would be a very bad experience to have a battery that’s loose in there. In some of our early prototypes we had that issue, and I’ll tell you, it doesn’t feel good at all, when you’re just moving around and trying to use your Deck.

However, Yang acknowledged the battery glue is a hurdle in Valve’s decision to make the Steam Deck a repair-friendly console and said, “We have rolled in a change to the geometry of the adhesive, making the battery easier to loosen.”

Valve is still working on bringing games with Anti-cheats

Last but not the least, Valve says it’s still pushing developers to enable anti-cheat to support Proton. Although, Destiny 2 and Fortnite developers are still refusing to work together. That said, the library of supported games has increased since Steam Deck’s launch, with games like Apex Legends adding support for Steam Deck. Valve is now working with the developers of Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Fall Guys to bring them to the Steam Deck.

A Dual-boot installer is coming

Dual-booting on Steam Deck is a tedious task, at least for now, as Valve says a dual-boot installer is on its way. However, they’re not prioritizing Windows. The duo also said installing games when the device’s asleep may soon be possible.

What are your thoughts on this? Are you excited about the upcoming updates to the console? Let us know in the comments section below.