Valve has officially confirmed its next-generation hardware lineup , headlined by the standalone Deckard VR headset and refreshed Steam Deck models, marking the company’s most ambitious foray into consumer devices since the original handheld launched in 2022.
The announcements arrived on Wednesday during the Steam Dev Days keynote in Seattle, where Valve co-founder Gabe Newell and hardware chief Pierre-Loup Griffais detailed a vision for seamless gaming across form factors.
“We’re building an ecosystem where your library travels with you—whether you’re on the couch, in VR, or on the go,” Newell told the audience of developers and press.
Deckard, priced at $499 and set for a spring 2026 release, stands out as Valve’s first untethered VR system. Powered by a custom AMD SoC with 12GB of unified memory, it delivers 4K-per-eye resolution on 144Hz OLED panels and weighs just 450 grams.
Built-in eye- and face-tracking enable natural avatar expressions in social spaces, while hand-gesture recognition lets users interact without controllers. Griffais demonstrated the feature by guiding a virtual drone through a crowded digital cityscape using only finger movements.
Two Steam Deck variants accompany the headset. The Steam Deck OLED, launching in December 2025 for $549 (512GB), upgrades the 2022 model with a 90Hz HDR display, 50% brighter output, and battery life extended to eight hours.
A more powerful Steam Deck 2 follows in mid-2026 at $649, featuring an AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU with hardware ray tracing and 1TB of storage, targeting 1080p gaming at 60 frames per second. Both run SteamOS 3.5, which introduces AI upscaling and instant cloud synchronization across devices.
Valve also revealed Steam Link 2.0—a $99 HDMI dongle for streaming Deckard or Deck games to televisions—and expanded SteamOS certification to third-party handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally.
The company pledged $500 million in grants to VR developers and teased “spatial computing” features by 2027, blending augmented reality overlays with physical environments.
The reveals end years of speculation fueled by patent filings and code leaks. Valve’s Index headset, released in 2019, struggled commercially against Meta’s Quest line, while the Steam Deck has shipped over 5 million units despite supply constraints.
With the VR market projected to reach $100 billion by 2028, Deckard’s wireless design and Steam library integration position it as a direct challenger to the Meta Quest 3 .
For Valve, success hinges on developer buy-in and execution. If Deckard delivers on its lightweight, high-fidelity promise, it could reignite mainstream interest in VR—just as competitors like Apple and Sony prepare their own moves. The unified Steam ecosystem may finally give PC gaming the mobility it has long lacked.
