An upgraded Steam Deck may be coming, but don't expect anything until late 2025 at the earliest. Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that the company wanted to upgrade the Deck's performance without sacrificing its battery life, which may not yet be possible.

Another concern Griffais raised is around brand messaging. A higher-performance Steam Deck could play games that the current Steam Deck can't, which could cause problems with both developers and customers. That does leave room for an upgraded, but not more powerful Steam Deck, i.e. a model with longer battery life or a higher quality screen. Here's the full statement Griffais gave the Verge:

"It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple, where every Deck can play the same games. As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be had. We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life. I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years, but we’re still closely monitoring innovations in architectures and fabrication processes to see where things are going there."