Valve booklet appears to confirm plans for future Steam Decks

Valve has appeared to confirm future iterations of its Steam Deck handheld are being planned.

As spotted by GamingOnLinux, a new Steam Deck Booklet refers to follow-ups to Valve’s handheld, which was released earlier this year.

The Steam Deck has proven extremely popular, with the company still fulfilling preorders at the time of writing.

“Steam Deck represents the first in a new category of Steam handheld gaming PCs,” the booklet reads. “In the future, Valve will follow up on this product with improvements and iterations to hardware and software, bringing new versions of Steam Deck to market.”

The booklet also refers to the Steam Deck as a “multi-generational product line,” and claims that Valve will “support Steam Deck and SteamOS” well into the foreseeable future.

If true, Steam Deck could buck the trend of Valve ending support for hardware support early on. The Steam Controller was released in 2015 alongside the Steam Machine. Steam Machines were largely unsupported following 2018 and Steam Controller was discontinued in 2019.

Valve has also said that the compatibility layer developed for Steam Deck will be adopted by other platforms such as ChromeOS.

The compatibility layer allows for games and applications that aren’t specifically designed for the Steam Deck to function.

VGC’s recent review of Marvel’s Spider-Man on PC praised the Steam Deck performance as a “marvel”.

It was recently discovered that Valve has quietly downgraded the SSD included with some Steam Deck models.

While all Steam Deck 256GB and 512GB models initially came with a PCI express 3.0 x4 SSD, some now ship with a PCI express 3.0 x2 SSD instead.