The Steam Deck OLED is here, but Valve say not to expect a true next-gen Steam Deck "for a long time"

While the Steam Deck OLED is awash with upgrades over the original handheld PC, it’s not a full replacement, and Valve still reckon that anyone wanting a proper Steam Deck 2 will be waiting a while.

I was told as much on the Steam Deck’s first anniversary earlier this year, and according to Valve designer Jay Shaw and software engineer Jeremy Selan, that stance won't change once the Steam Deck OLED releases on November 16th. In an RPS interview, the full version of which is coming soon, the two developers explained why the real next generation of Steam Deck will take a few years – and why they decided against making the Steam Deck OLED’s new processor more powerful as well.

"We're looking for a generational leap in terms of performance before we start talking about the next generation of Steam Deck," Shaw says. "And we're not there yet."

"One of the core challenges in product design," Selan adds, "is you really have to balance the tradeoffs. And I would say cost, performance, and battery life are the three things you really want to think about. And even then, this is a brand new APU, we just tuned it for battery life. We could have gone the other direction and tuned it for performance, but when you look at how those things would balance out, it didn't quite make sense, I think, for our customers."

The Steam Deck OLED’s efficiency improvements are definitely a highlight – compared to the original Steam Deck's battery life, some games get up to 59% more uptime before running dry. Both models lag behind the likes of the Asus ROG Ally on graphics power, but given the Steam Deck OLED is easily the longest-lasting of the bunch, it’s easy to see how a focus on power efficiency can benefit a portable handheld.

Tuning current-gen hardware is one thing, though, and equipping a next-gen Steam Deck with drastically higher framerate pushing power is another. According to Selan, the technology required to make that jump simply doesn’t exist yet.

"The new generation, if we did one, is not close. It would be years away, when we feel like the processor and GPU technology is at a stage where it's worthy of doing a new performance target," he explains.

Still, that doesn’t mean that the Steam Deck range will go on hiatus following the OLED release. One area Valve are apparently keen on exploring is alternative designs and colour options, like that of the transluscent, orange-highlighed Steam Deck OLED Limited Edition.

"We have so many ideas," Shaw says. "So many ideas as to how many fun colorways we can put out there. That's not, obviously, a new generation of Steam Deck, but we hope that this limited edition is something people get excited about. Because I know for a fact that the design team would just absolutely love to dive in, in earnest, to doing some other colours and fun things."

"But yeah, this is the one, for a long time."