What's Valve Cooking? New Radio Certification Surfaces In South Korea
Over on X, VR influencer and YouTuber Brad ‘SadlyItsBradley’ Lynch posted that a “new Valve hardware device just received radio certification in South Korea.” The certification notes that the device receiving certification is a “specific low power wireless device” that operates in the 5Ghz frequency band and has wireless LAN capabilities. The device mentioned is also given the model name “1030,” which is not much to go off of. However, Lynch also notes that the Valve Index, a VR headset launched in 2019, had the model name 1007, while the Steam Deck had the name 1010.
Ultimately, this is a small amount of information to go from, but we can certainly speculate or rule out things such as an updated Steam Deck. Earlier this year, we outlined how long people might have to wait for a Steam Deck 2, estimating around two or three years before it would be reasonable to have an update. Of course, this is not wholly off the table, but we would not really expect to see certifications for a product this far out from production and sale.
The more interesting thought here is that Valve is potentially working on something in the virtual reality space once more. This is an idea that we kicked around in July, noting that Valve Index sales had tapered off and the market had gone a little stagnant. Coupling this with some relatively recent hires for hardware teams at Valve, it would not be far-fetched to anticipate perhaps another VR headset from the company.
No matter what the actual device is that Valve is moving, it may be soon that we hear some official news on it. X user @Fimre77 did the math to find that the Steam Deck had 92 days from certification to launch, and the Valve Index only had 49 days. However, this is also Valve we are talking about, and if this is the third big internal hardware project, it might never see the light of day. We kid, though, probably.
