The Steam Deck has finally made its way to Australia, and to commemorate this occasion, the folks over at Press Start interviewed Lawrence Yang and Jay Shaw, Steam Deck designers, and Yazan Aldehayyat, a hardware engineer.

They talked about a lot of aspects of bringing the Steam Deck to Australia, such as building the infrastructure to easily sell hardware in Australia, setting up the logistics, and more. However, the most interesting part was how they are constantly working to improve the Steam Deck from a hardware and software perspective.

What did the interview reveal?

First things first – Valve didn’t come out and directly say it’s working on a Steam Deck 2. Instead, we got to learn more about the devs’ ongoing commitment to their current range of hardware, software support, and what lies beyond that.

They’re still committed to the original Steam Deck

“We are continuously investing in, even, like, first-generation Steam Deck LCD. So we're constantly pushing software updates, firmware updates, all the improvements that we're able to get out of the old OLED, we always try to port it back to the LCD. So we have SteamOS 3.6 coming out soon. It's going to have, depending on this game and depending on this scenario, like 10 to 15% extra battery life for LCD”

Yazan Aldehayyat, Hardware Engineer

An extra 10 – 15% battery life for the LCD model sounds great, as we’ve reviewed it in-house and felt that the battery life could be better. Besides this, compatibility with other platforms, such as Xbox Game Pass, was also brought up, which one of the designers responded with:

PC-like support via Proton is a key focus

“So Game Pass is interesting. We have a good relationship with Microsoft and they took steps to make sure that Xbox Game Pass via web is as good an experience as they could make it. They made tutorials and stuff for that. We really want people to be able to treat a Steam Deck like a PC. And so we offer the desktop side. We add features so that you can add games to Steam and you take advantage of Proton, so you can run Windows executables through Proton. So we do what we can to stay out of the way and let people do what they need to do. I think that's where we are right now.”

Lawrence Yang, Designer

To us, Proton is the glue that seals the whole Steam Deck project together. Bringing a massive library of Windows games to a Linux-based device through the Proton translation layer is what makes the Deck the most popular handheld on the market today (at least that’s what our handheld poll down below would suggest). With support for handheld-friendly subscriptions like Xbox Game Pass or GeForce Now, it’s a good spot.

The next generation of hardware is being worked on

Lastly, the future of the Steam Deck and whether we'll see the next iteration of this handheld device were discussed. This is what they had to say regarding this:

“We're working on future generations of this. Steam Deck is kind of the culmination of everything we learned making hardware up to that point with Steam Controller, Steam Machines, Valve Index and Steam Link. And so we took all of those things that we learned and said, OK, here's Steam Deck as one package. And in the same token, we're going to take the learnings we have from Steam Deck and move it forward to future new hardware as well. So we have things that we're not talking about today.”

Lawrence Yang, Designer

Final word

So, while we don't have a clear yes or no answer on whether we'll be getting a Steam Deck 2 or any other variant, it seems like they are working towards improving their hardware with each device. Needless to say, Valve’s next handheld should be even better than its predecessor and/or its competition. If you’re wondering which titles are compatible with the Steam Deck, check out the official Verified list here. If you’re aiming to push its boundaries, we recommend giving God of War or WoW a shot.

About the Author

Ussamah Mehmood

Ussamah works as a content writer and editor at BGFG. He is experienced in tech, hardware, gaming, and marketing.