Despite the problems with the supply of the components, which at the time caused the delay of the launch, it seems that Valve satisfied with the commercial performance of the Steam Decksince he has explained in a recently published book about the console/mini-PC that the device is just the beginning and that he intends to go deeper in the same vein.
Valve is dedicated to explaining the history, circumstances, characteristics and its intentions around the Steam Deck, but what is interesting for the general public is on page 26, when the reader reaches a section entitled “The Future: more Steam Decks, more SteamOS”. The title itself leaves very little to the imagination implicitly confirm the existence of the Steam Deck 2. This should not be so surprising if we take into account that last June we echoed that AMD is preparing the processor for the second generation of the console, but this book published by the corporation behind Steam is responsible for clearing up any doubts.
When we say that Valve is going to delve into the same line, it means that it also maintains its commitment to SteamOS, its operating system based on GNU/Linux technologies. The company has said that “SteamOS will continue to evolve, including new features and improvements to game compatibility through ‘Proton’. As of this writing, hundreds of changes have already been made to the Steam Deck’s operating system since the device first shipped. That will continue throughout the life of the Steam Deck until future generations of the product have been on the market for some time.”
Proton is the Wine-based compatibility layer powered by Valve to make it easy to run Windows video games on Linux and macOS. Obviously, it is a core part of SteamOS and the Steam Deck, but its preponderance over native games is something that generates debate within circles. Linux users. It currently supports a large number of titles available for Windows and is capable of offering very good performance thanks to the good work of the translators it incorporates.
In addition to future generations of the console, Valve has announced that it is working on bring the Steam Deck user interface to the desktop client available for Windows, Linux and macOS as the new version of the Big Picture interface, which is oriented towards Steam Link and to facilitate the handling of the Steam application through a controller. We’ll see if Linux makes it easy to use gamescope, the composer developed by Valve for SteamOS that is published as free software.
Another thing announced by Valve is that the “Steam Deck support will be inherited by other platforms, such as ChromeOS, which will soon bring Steam gaming support to all Chromebook users.” This reinforces the line that the Steam client for ChromeOS is based on the development carried out around Linux and the Steam Deck, and seeing that Google Stadia has been a failure, it is in the search giant’s interest now that Valve is strongly implanted in your system to better compete with Windows.
In short, not only will there be Steam Deck 2, but Valve is going to bring the interface used by the console to the other systems it supports and has ChromeOS as one of its priorities for the future along with SteamOS.