Valve Is Already Thinking About the Next Steam Deck, Says 4K Might Be Doable in a Couple Years

The Steam Deck won’t be out until December this year (provided you were so quick with the pre-order to snatch one of the first batch units), but Valve is already thinking about the next iteration of the device. In an interview with RPS, Valve designer Greg Coomer said:

I think it’s often extra interesting at Valve because so many of us want to treat even this device like a platform that can just be upgraded at will, and we can just, you know, why not upgrade it every three months? Obviously, that wouldn’t be the best service that we would do for game developers or customers if we tried to operate that way. We’re already looking ahead to the future because we believe this is a product line that will have a long life, so of course we’re thinking about what would we build next, and we’re starting to make plans in those directions. But there is not a design for Steam Deck 2, but we’re thinking along those lines and having conversations already about where would we draw the line for our next iteration of the device.

Perhaps the next Steam Deck will be able to target 4K resolution. Greg Coomer and his fellow colleague Lawrence Yang said this was never a goal for the first iteration of the product, but it could be doable in a couple of years from now.

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[…] GC: achieving 4K and having a display that runs at that resolution wasn’t really a design target for us.

LY: And it wouldn’t have been worth the trade-off. Technically, it probably is possible to create a device of this size that can output at 4K…

GC: And run all these games…

LY: Right, but what would that device actually look like? How long could it run those games? How hot would it get? It’s a lot of balancing and we’re actually really happy with where this is right now. You know, technology marches forward. Maybe in a year or two we actually will have something that becomes more possible.

To be clear, though, the Steam Deck will indeed output at a higher resolution than the default 1280 × 800 when using the dock or any other HDMI to USB-C adapter. Of course, the frame rate may take a major hit depending on the game played.

We’ve prepared a quick poll to gauge your interest in a 4K capable Steam Deck 2. Feel free to discuss it in the comments!