The exact quote:
It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence. We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.
I dunno, I expect the Deck to last far longer than the average console if anything. It’s a PC, so the games are pretty much guaranteed to keep coming for decades to come, as they have for decades past.
The hardware will fall behind, so I think the point where the newest Triple A games won’t be playable will come within a few years, but I bet whatever visual novels or pixelated indie games release in 2035 will still run just fine on it.
Plus, it’s designed to be repairable, unlike most consoles. And even if Valve stops maintaining SteamOS for the Steam Deck, you’ll still be able to install other distros, so software support isn’t something I’m very concerned about either.
