AYANEO hosted a product showcase stream on their YouTube channel which went deep into the technical details of their upcoming AYANEO 2S refresh to last year's AYANEO 2. The new handheld console features some major improvements under the hood which include AMD's Ryzen 7 7840U with Radeon 780M graphics, LPDDR5X-7500 and a cooling system redesign. The Ryzen 7 7840U is similar to the recently announced Ryzen Z1 Extreme that the ASUS ROG Ally can be equipped with, both SoCs bringing 8 "Zen 4" cores and a 12CU RDNA3 graphics engine down to a TDP of 15 W. The cooling system for this SoC has been upgraded to a triple heatpipe array soldered to a copper heatspreader which AYANEO is dubbing their "3+1" cooling design. They claim the new design drops SoC load temperatures by as much as 11.6C, and that it has 33% more surface area compared to the previous generation AYANEO 2. AYANEO also claims optimizations to the fit and finish with the body and trigger assemblies being improved to better fit the hand as well as aid in ease of disassembly. Other specifications have remained mostly unchanged such as the 7-inch 1920x1200 IPS display, 16 GB RAM, and 512 GB base configuration SSD.

Asobo Studio and Focus Entertainment have announced via Twitter that their smash hit survival adventure game - A Plague Tale: Requiem - is now officially verified on Steam Deck. Valve has bestowed a verified badge upon the critically acclaimed sequel to A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019), and the official Twitter for the series posted about that confirmation yesterday, along with a witty tagline: "They say "keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer", so make sure to bring the rats with you wherever you go!"

A Plague Tale: Requiem has been granted "Great on Deck" status, but early user feedback indicates that the survival horror game is still not fully optimized for Steam Deck's hardware - stuttering in-game performance and crashes are being reported by early adopters. Asobo's flagship title has been quite demanding on home console systems and PCs alike - so it is not surprising that Valve's handheld is struggling through the technical showcase. Many hope that the development team will get onto optimization work, pronto.