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 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.
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