Almost immediately after Valve launched the Steam Deck, fans were already starting to ponder what the next version of the gaming handheld would look like. Now, following the launch of the Valve Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and the new Steam Controller , Valve has confirmed that there will still be a considerable wait for the next-gen gaming handheld. In an interview with IGN , Valve engineer, Pierre-Loup Griffais, commented that the company has "a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be," but that current-gen hardware doesn't yet meet Valve's expectations when it comes to battery life or efficiency. This is in keeping with Valve's previous statements regarding a Steam Deck 2—in 2023, Valve designer Lawrence Yang and Griffais himself said that the Steam Deck 2 would not launch for "a few years," again citing a lack of meaningful CPU and GPU performance improvements.

As it turns out, the hang-up for the Steam Deck 2 is battery life, not so much performance, with Griffais saying "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." As we've seen with recent devices like the OneXPlayer OneXFly Apex , it is possible to achieve desktop RTX 4060-tier performance in a handheld form factor, but even optimistic manufacturer-supplied battery life estimates on those devices are not particularly impressive. On the other hand, Valve's current-gen Steam Deck boasts impressive efficiency. Even if it doesn't deliver high-resolution AAA gaming performance, the Steam Deck manages to deliver halfway decent gaming performance, even at just 15 W TDP.