With Valve today officially announcing pricing and availability for the Steam Controller, it was only a matter of time before people started asking questions about the Steam Machine and even the Steam Deck 2. Fortunately, in a recent comment to IGN, Valve developer, Pierre-Loup Griffais, has addressed the latter right off the bat. Griffais commented that the Steam Deck 2 is actively being worked on at Valve, although neither he nor the gaming giant can divulge any more concrete information about the upcoming gaming handheld, let alone a potential release window. He does note that the Steam Deck 2 will be a culmination of the lesson Valve learned during the development of its previous hardware projects.

Given prior comments that the Steam Deck 2 would need to be a sizeable performance leap over the current Steam Deck, it would not be surprising to see Valve wait until something like RDNA 4 or 5 reaches sufficient efficiency, performance, and pricing figures to be stuffed into a handheld APU without severely impacting the battery life. At that point, the Steam Deck 2 may have more serious competition to contend with, specifically from the likes of Sony. It has recently been rumored that the Steam Deck 2 would not use a semi-custom AMD APU but would launch in 2028 like the original Steam Deck, instead being powered by an off-the-shelf unit—a move that may offer Valve more flexibility to react to different market conditions and new mid-cycle CPU refreshes.The full comment by Griffais reads:

"We're hard at work on it, and obviously every step of the way, if you look at our hardware projects over the years, you can draw a straight line from the original Steam Controller and Steam Machine to Steam Deck, to everything that we're announcing and shipping this year. And we expect Steam Deck 2 will be a lot of the same where a lot of what we're doing here will be learnings that build up to it."