Steam Deck

Because the capitalist system has trained the consumer to always want new, shiny things.

PC gamers are very excited that there's a handheld PC on the market thats made by Valve, but they don't understand its meant to be a low-power gaming device. its not meant to be a 500+fps massive rig with all the trimmings and fixins.

They are trying to apply their upgrade logic/obsessive consumerism to a device that neither wants nor needs that in its own market.

When I first got the steam deck, I thought it was so great and used it all the time; I still do.

I told my wife that I liked it so much that I would buy the next one as soon as it released.

After having it for some time, I realized that all the games I play run on it easily and there is no real need to upgrade.

So, I plan to use this steamdeck until it it stops working. I imagine that will be a while as I’m going to repair it when/if something breaks.

I would like a smaller deck though, the current one is hard to hold if you don't have big man hands

Not only that, but raw horsepower and battery life are always in a delicate balance in any portable device.

There are practical limitations when it comes to current battery technology. Not to mention heat generation and dissipation that comes with more powerful hardware.

It is like you don't even care about profits and value the consumer.

Yup, they’ve straight up said that they’re not interested in iterative upgrades. They said they’d only consider a Deck 2 when the hardware was actually in a place that it would be a meaningful upgrade.

In the meantime, they’re focused on getting devs to actually optimize their games for the SD’s (admittedly aging) hardware. Basically, forcing devs to actually plan for Steam Deck support, instead of just shipping an unoptimized piece of junk out the door and blaming hardware limitations when nothing except the newest cards can play it. There are plenty of games that look gorgeous on the Deck, so we know it’s 100% possible to do so.

New steam controller was leaked earlier this year, and leaks for the new steam machine came out a few days ago. So you'll get your wish pretty soon probably.

Take the screen out of a steam deck and call it a day.

Almost. Also put the dual stage triggers back in.

I guess it’s consumerism and people always wanting more.

I’d be happy if the Steam Deck 2 wasn’t released until 2028 as I’ve just got my used LCD in 2025.

There are two kinds of people who would like a refreshed Steam Deck, in my experience:

1. People who seem to think it needs to be faster. Since it appears to be crafted to provide suitable performance for the 720p display it has (which I don't personally think needs to be changed, considering the whole "portable" use case), this seems to just be a "bigger number better" argument and those people should probably go out and buy a Lenovo Legion / ROG Ally / whatever.

2. People who are otherwise happy, but think it should have a newer, more efficient processor to get longer battery life, and make less heat/noise in the process. There's a measurable gulf between the current Zen2/RDNA2 CPU and a theoretical modern Zen5/RDNA3.5 (or even RDNA4) model in that regard; it could be tuned to deliver roughly the same performance as the original (or a little more, for the handful of games that tend to miss their performance target slightly) but deliver longer battery life.

We got a hint at 2) with the OLED model's CPU using a newer manufacturing process improving thermals and battery life (of course it did also have a bigger battery). I think the number of people willing to pay a bit extra for what could be an even larger improvement in that area is probably more than some would like to admit.

(I personally fit in that latter category. Considering a full work day including a public transport commute and lunch break, not a whole lot of extra battery could well be the difference between having to carry a charger and not)

It will never be "end of life". There are retro consoles that people are buying just for running SNES or GameBoy Advance games. Even those are perfectly functional for their purpose. Even if the Steam Deck got hard locked to only run games released up till 2025, it will still have enduring value. EoL can mean the battery is too degraded, but the battery is replaceable.

A "soft EoL" will realistically come when much much faster hardware is cheaper, the Steam Deck is out of production and it starts struggling to play even indie games. At this point, buying a secondhand Deck for £100 is still going to be a bargain and get recommended for emulators, retro gamers and patient gamers.

They said they would wait until there was a meaningful increase in the power or efficiency they could get out of the form-factor.

The OG deck launched 3.5 years ago, and since then not much has changed. The steam deck GPU has 1.6 TFlop of FP32 compute at 15W. AMD's newest low-power APUs have 2.3 TFlop of FP32 at 28W - nearly double the power for a <50% theoretical performance gain.

A semi-custom APU (that removes the useless AI engine) would compare more favorably, but we are still talking about maybe 20% more performance, not exactly game changing for the cost.

I got the OLED when it came out and it was the best purchase I made when it came to ‘consoles’

I don’t think I have turned my PS5 on more than a half dozen times since I got my Deck and that was just to play games like Beatsaber with the family.

The deck just offers way too much flexibility for games not to mention you can take it anywhere.

Just a note, Proton is mostly Wine, a program that has been in the making for decades and could be used to play Windows programs (including games) on Linux long before Valve started pouring resources into it. They have "just" concentrated development on games.