Steam Deck will have even more competition, this time from MSI

With the release of the Steam Deck OLED last year, Valve keeps its place as the head honcho of modern handheld PC technology. However, the market is starting to become crowded with alternatives, and one more tech firm is throwing its hat into the ring.

As spotted by The Verge, it looks as though multinational IT corporation MSI will be releasing its own Steam Deck competitor. That’s according to leaked images, at least. In recent social media posts (originally reported by Videocardz), the company uploaded a teaser clip, showing something is certainly inbound from the laptop manufacturer.

There’s also a message saying that a “whole new breed of MSI dragon is coming,” as well as instructions for us to “get a grip and stay tuned.” That last definitely hints at a handheld. In any case, details will be revealed at CES 2024 – judging by the hashtags – which begins next week.

Deck the halls with – hmm, bit late for that pun

It looks as though this device – said to be called “Claw” – will run with an Intel Meteor Lake processor. Whether this is accurate or not can’t be said at this stage, but the fact that Intel commented under MSI’s Twitter tease hints that the tech giant is involved.

We’ve already seen the release of the Lenovo Legion GO, which came out last November, plus, the ASUS ROG Ally before that. Both of these have evidently been wanting to muscle in on the portable gaming market. Oh, also there’s Sony’s Project Q, which came out recently, but that’s more in-line with console gaming than with PC.

Whatever MSI has up its sleeve, it’s clearly worth dropping hints about just before CES. And this recent leak seems to only cement the rumor. We’ll know more about it sometime next week, but it’s almost certain that that Valve will have another rival to contend with.