Valve isn’t letting the ongoing memory crisis derail its plans for the Steam Deck 2. Speaking to IGN, Valve developers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Jeff Leinbaugh said the company’s goals for its next-generation handheld remain unchanged, despite the soaring cost and availability of RAM.
Asked whether the memory shortage had affected its plans, Griffais’ answer was refreshingly blunt: “Not really.” Valve is still waiting for the kind of performance and efficiency jump that would make Steam Deck 2 feel like a genuine generational upgrade rather than a slightly faster Deck.
“We’ve talked before about how we want to make sure there’s a very delineated performance improvement for something like a future Steam Deck, and I think we’re still looking at it in the same way. It’s just a matter of looking at the current conditions and seeing how and when we can deliver something like that. But from what we’re working on, as far as the user experience goes and what the product that we’re trying to build goes, it’s very similar goals.”
That distinction matters. Valve has previously said it isn’t interested in simply delivering 20%, 30%, or even 50% more performance if it comes with the same battery life and doesn’t feel like a meaningful generational leap. The company wants a much bigger improvement in performance-per-watt before it considers the next Deck ready.
The interesting part is that Valve’s stance feels different from what we heard around the Steam Machine. When that device launched at $1,049, Valve acknowledged that it was significantly more expensive than originally intended, with the memory crisis forcing its hand. The company had reportedly been targeting something closer to $750 before the market went sideways.
With Steam Deck 2, however, the message seems less like “we’re trying to beat the market on price” and more like “we’ll build the right product and see what the market costs.” That’s an important shift, especially after Valve raised the Steam Deck OLED’s price to $789 for 512GB and $949 for 1TB because of rising memory and storage costs.
That makes it increasingly difficult to imagine a cheap Steam Deck 2. Valve may be willing to wait for better silicon and memory conditions, but when the successor eventually arrives, it is almost certainly going to live in a more premium pricing environment. The real challenge won’t just be making a better handheld. It’ll be convincing people that whatever Valve charges still feels like a Steam Deck value proposition.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.