What’s next for the Steam Deck?

12.09.2023 - 17:07 / destructoid.com / Deck

The Steam Deck has managed to make quite a splash since it launched in 2022. According to analysts at Omdia, the handheld is expected to surpass 3 million units sold this year. You won’t have much trouble figuring out why the portable gaming PC has been so popular. Running the Linux-based SteamOS, the Deck gives you instant access to your Steam library while you’re on the go. It’s not just for games, however, and when you switch to desktop mode, you have a fully-fledged PC in your hands.

One of the biggest selling points of the Deck is its customizability, both on the software and hardware level. Don’t like SteamOS? Just swap it out for Windows. Feel like you need more internal storage? The SSD can be easily replaced. More adventurous Deck owners have even changed larger components, such as the screen.

In the grand scheme of things, the Deck is relatively young, as it’s barely a year old. Despite this, so much has changed since the world got its hands on it. Consumer expectations have heightened, and in response games are rapidly growing more complex, demanding increasingly more from the systems they are played on. This has begun to place hard limits on what can be played enjoyably on Valve’s handheld.

Additionally, the portable gaming device faces more competitors than ever. Of course, plenty of handheld PCs have been on the market before the Deck’s launch. However, Valve has managed to catch lightning in a bottle with the Deck thanks to its user-friendliness, reasonable price point, and easy customizability.

Others have taken note, leading to more portables entering the market, and they feature specs that make them quite tempting for anyone looking for a handheld gaming device. So where does this leave the Deck, and how much longer can we expect it to endure? Answering this question would require a good look at the gaming scene the device is facing.

When Valve first revealed the Steam Deck, it appeared to be a revolutionary device that would sever the tether between players and their desktop PCs. Furthermore, despite its relatively small size, the device was advertised as being capable of handling modern AAA games. When speaking to IGN in 2021, Valve developers claimed that they had “achieved the level of performance that is required to really run the latest generation of games without problems” and they hadn’t “really found something that we could throw at this device that it couldn’t handle–at least not yet.”

At the time these weren’t false claims, and Control was one of the main games used to showcase the handheld’s power. Anyone with reasonable expectations would understand that as games grow more demanding, the Deck will eventually struggle to play the latest triple-A games. What is