I'll be honest, my Steam Deck is still trucking along just fine, even with four years of light between today and its 2022 release date. Nevertheless, there are more than a few people who'd quite like a Steam Deck 2 (though, uh, even they are probably prepared to wait for prices to become sane). It's been a while, after all.
Well, perhaps some good news, then: in our chat with Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, the pair said that the Steam Machine is a bit of a different beast. "I don't think we're thinking about [the Steam Machine] with quite as long of a timeframe as something like the Steam Deck," said Griffais.
"The Steam Deck, by its nature, needs a little bit more of a fixed performance target for both developers and users to make sense of, 'What can I play on this?' and not have that picture change once every year, every two years," said Griffais. "Whereas the Steam Machine is very much in line with gaming PCs. There's a big gradient of it: low-end CPUs, high-end CPUs and GPUs—Steam Machine is somewhere on that gradient, right? So I think it's a little bit less important to have a fixed performance target for, like, five years for a product like that."
So, there you have it, right? Steam Machine 2 imminent, perhaps releasing concurrently with Steam Machine 3? Well, not quite. While Valve doesn't think the Steam Machine needs to hew to Steam Deck timeframes, that doesn't mean it's diving right into a second iteration.
"At the same time," continued Griffais, "we don't really have immediate plans to be like, 'In N years we'll have a different performance target,' or something. We're actually really curious to see how things pan out… there's a lot of questions about the new systems generation, how that's gonna roll out, how games are gonna adapt." In other words, Valve is paying attention to how console manufacturers and other tech firms are handling the transition to a new generation in our current, RAM-crisis-afflicted world.
Aldehayyat was quick to point out that the next iteration of Steam Machine hardware isn't right around the corner, either, and that's partially just a reflection of PC gamers' modern habits. "I think we're seeing a natural slowdown of the upgrade cycle for gaming PCs," said Aldehayyat, "so in some ways that probably means that the Steam Machine is a viable product for longer than you would have expected if it was launching 10 years ago." That means the Machine as-is "probably has more longevity… it's gonna basically be in line with typical PC upgrade cycles and what people typically do.
"It's just a matter of when it makes sense to [upgrade], at what price point, at what time, on what games are available. Like if a bunch of new games come out on Steam that require more performance, that would probably make us wanna upgrade the Steam Machine faster." Alright, guess we're waiting for Cyberpunk 2 then.
