Valve holds course on Steam Deck 2 as Steam Frame pre-orders open

Valve has opened pre-order registration for its Steam Frame headset at £889 / US$1,059 and insisted a painful shortage of memory and storage has "Not really" changed its plan for a Steam Deck 2.

Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais gave that short answer to IGN when asked whether the component crisis had forced a rethink of the next handheld. He said the goals for the user experience and the product Valve wants to build remain similar and unchanged, according to Eurogamer.

The company still wants a clear jump in performance before it commits. Valve confirmed in April that it is working on a Steam Deck 2, building on lessons from the original Steam Deck and later hardware. It says it is still figuring out "how and when" to do it, according to The Verge.

That caution lands in a difficult market. Valve says the ongoing memory crisis has affected pricing and availability across its hardware, including Frame, and caused several delays. A Steam Machine engineer said in July that component prices were "still getting worse" and still rising.

Frame is the last of the trio Valve announced last year to reach buyers, after the Steam Controller and Steam Machine. Valve describes Steam Frame as a streaming-first, wireless VR headset — a head-mounted display that plays games beamed from a PC or Valve hardware — sold with controllers and able to handle a user's whole Steam library.

The price puts it well above mainstream rivals. The base 256GB Steam Frame costs US$1,059, with a 1TB model starting at US$1,299. That leaves a gap of more than £340 to the Quest 3, according to Eurogamer.

Valve's other prices have already moved. Late last month Steam Deck prices rose by roughly 43 to 46 percent. The 512GB Steam Deck OLED rose to US$789 and the 1TB Steam Deck OLED to US$949, increases of US$240 to US$300.

All three machines — Steam Deck, Steam Machine and Steam Frame — run SteamOS, Valve's operating system optimised for gaming. That shared system helps games move between handheld, living-room box and headset. It also brings limits. A number of major games are unplayable on Steam Machine because their anti-cheat software, the tools that block cheaters in online play, does not support Linux and SteamOS.

For players, this means two stories at once. Frame is here to order now, with a high price shaped by parts. Deck 2 is still waiting for its moment, and Valve will not ship it until it can offer faster hardware without losing what made the first Deck work.