The speculated Steam Deck 2 release date window

Back in November 2023, Valve designer Lawrence Yang told Bloomberg that he expected the ‘next-generation power upgrade’ they’d be looking for to justify bringing out the Steam Deck 2 would not be available for ‘at least two or three years’. Originally it seemed possible that we could see a Steam Deck 2 2025 release date, which was initially reinforced by AMD showing a slide that appeared to show a Steam Deck powered by their new Z2 Series processors (you can see this below). However, a coder who works for Valve on the Steam Deck, Pierre-Loup Griffais, said over on Bluesky that “there is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck“. It could be that Valve is working on their own custom variant of this APU which has a different name and will still release it this year, however, it seems to be a pretty direct rebuttal.

Although some outlets are still sticking to the earliest date in the Lawrence Yang estimate, saying this could still mean we might see a Steam Deck 2 released in November 2025, we consider this to be unlikely following the comments by Pierre-Loup Graffais. Additionally, the decision of the company to allow the Legion Go S handheld to run on SteamOS (the SteamOS version is arriving in May) suggests they’re not particularly concerned that it will pose competition to their own handset releases this year… probably because they aren’t doing any.

Based on the above, our prediction is that we won’t see a Steam Deck 2 released in 2025, but possibly sometime in 2026 after the big tech reveals of CES that year in January, potentially on some new Ryzen (or other mobile processor) tech that could bring this next-gen power upgrade the company is waiting for. February – November 2026 is our current Steam Deck 2 release window prediction, though this remains very speculative, and it could end up coming out even later.

The somewhat misleading AMD Z2 Series slide

Mr Griffais’ response

Steam Deck 2 specs predictions

Given their stated aim of delivering true next-generation power with the Steam Deck 2, we can expect a substantial uplift in processing and graphical processing power. This could come with the next iteration of Ryzen mobile processors, or it could be that Valve themselves are working on a customized APU, which would likely use a Ryzen chip as its basis. Beyond this though, there’s not a lot to go on.

Given the increasing demand for it in the recommended specs of the latest games, RAM may increase to 32GB from the current LPDDR5. Storage probably won’t increase too much, though there’s always a chance that the upper SSD threshold could be upped from 1TB to 2TB.

An improved battery will likely be a major priority for Valve, given this is a handheld device after all. The current Steam Deck OLED battery duration in real-world scenarios (not based on Valve’s marketing claims) varies very much depending upon the sort of game you’re playing, but typically lasts anywhere between 1-and-a-half to seven hours, and we expect they’ll be looking to increase this. The 50.08Wh battery in the OLED was an upgrade over the 40Wh one in the original Steam Deck with LCD screen, and brought a battery duration improvement of around 30-50%, so we’re hoping for a similar leap with the Steam Deck 2. Brands such as ASUS have already made massive leaps in the battery department, with the ROG Ally X doubling the battery of its predecessor, for example.

It seems likely that the Steam Deck 2 will have an OLED screen, as the contrast ratio, HDR brightness, and extremely fast response times, were all very highly praised aspects of the Steam Deck OLED. Upping the refresh rate to at least 120Hz to compete with the current ROG Ally X is also likely, though we don’t imagine Valve will see it as much of a priority to go one better – the subjective user experience for most people won’t be significantly improved by achieving the highest refresh rate, and gaming on the current Steam Deck OLED display just looks better than most competing models, despite being capped at 90Hz.

Screen size may increase slightly, though we imagine the company will only do so if it can maintain the same overall size of the console – portability remains key here. This is what they did when they increased the Steam Deck OLED’s screen size to 7.4″ from the 7″ in the LCD variant, whilst maintaining very similar dimensions and also reducing the weight somewhat. Screen resolution may increase from the native 1280×800 (essentially a 720p screen but upped to a 16:10 aspect ratio with more vertical head space), though personally, we wouldn’t consider this a priority – given the small size of the screen, this resolution is absolutely fine. Native VRR support is something we expect so see for the built-in display, though what form this will take remains to be seen. If it comes with an AMD APU then FreeSync seems the most likely.

Finally, WiFi 7 support seems a very likely and obvious upgrade, as does a Steam Deck mount like the one that has just come out for the present versions.