It's already been a year since the Steam Deck launched. A huge leap forward in handheld gaming, but as is commonplace in today's society, as soon as we get something new, we want to know when something even newer will be here. When it comes to the Steam Deck, anyone waiting for its successor might want to settle in.
Rock Paper Shotgun spoke with Valve's Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais all about the Steam Deck's first year. During their conversation the developers discussed how far the console has come, detailing its updates and just how many more games are verified and playable on it now compared to this time last year.
The topic of what's next was broached, and while the updates will continue and the list of playable games will get longer, when it comes to a next-gen Deck, the answer was nothing, at least not for a while. “A true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn’t be for a few years,” Yang confirmed, adding to a comment he made talking of Valve's excitement to test the realms of what's possible with its one-year-old piece of hardware.
One of the reasons it might not feel like the Steam Deck has already been on the market for an entire year is how scarce they were at launch. Those of you who attempted to get in early were likely given a vague window detailing when your Deck would arrive, probably months after you placed the order. The wait for a Deck is now down to just a couple of weeks as buying it and various other new-gen consoles finally doesn't require us to sit in endless virtual queues for hours on end.
For many of us who have been playing handheld games since using a Game Boy in the dark required holding a torch in your mouth just to see the screen, it's hard to believe the Steam Deck is a thing. Some of the games the handheld PC can run defies belief. You'll even be able to play The Last Of Us on the go soon as Neil Druckmann confirmed the PC port of Part 1, which launches later this month, will be playable on Steam Deck.