Valve thinks incremental handheld refreshes are “not really fair to customers”

There are certain products where an annual release has been normalised. Smartphones, tablets and smartwatches to name a few. And while it’s relatively young, certain manufacturers in the gaming handheld PC space have seemingly already settled into yearly refreshes. But for Valve, the company that helped popularise gaming handheld PCs with the Steam Deck, admitted that’s not something they want to do in a recent interview with us.

While no Steam Deck competitors were directly named, it’s clear that Valve doesn’t think it’s a good look for the gaming handheld space.

For context, there was only a year between the release of the Ayaneo and the Ayaneo 2, and the Asus ROG Ally landed in 2023 with the refreshed ROG Ally X arriving in 2024. MSI told the Verge that it had plans for the Claw 2, Claw 3 and Claw 4 in the next two years. Refreshingly, like Valve with its Steam Deck 2, Lenovo is reportedly not in a rush to release the Lenovo Legion Go 2.