SteamOS continues its slow spread across the PC gaming landscape

Over time, Valve sees such support expanding to other Arm-based devices as well. “It’s already completely open source, so you can download it and run SteamOS, now we’re releasing SteamOS for Arm, you can have gaming on any Arm device,” Valve engineer Jeremy Sellon told PC Gamer in November. “This is a first. We’re very excited about it.”

This is an especially exciting prospect when you consider the wide range of Arm-based Android gaming handhelds that currently exist across the price and performance spectrum. While emulators like Fake may technically allow players to access Steam games on that type of handheld, official Arm support for SteamOS could lead to a veritable explosion of hardware options with native SteamOS support.

Valve also seems to be aware of this capability. “There are a lot of price points and power consumption points where Arm-based chipsets are doing a better job of serving the market,” Valve’s Pierre-Louis Griffais told The Verge last month. “When you get into low power, anything less than a Steam Deck, I think you’ll find there’s an Arm chip that’s probably competitive with x86 offerings in that segment. We’re very excited to be able to expand PC gaming to include all those options instead of being arbitrarily limited to a subset of the market.”

This is great news for fans of PC-based gaming handhelds, as Valve’s announcement of the Steam Machine will provide a convenient alternative to SteamOS access on the living room TV. However, for desktop PC gamers, rigs with Nvidia GPUs may remain the final frontier for SteamOS for the foreseeable future. “With Nvidia, the integration of open-source drivers is still quite early,” Griffis told Friendroid about a year ago. “There’s still a lot of work to be done on that front… so it’s a little complicated to say we’re going to release this version when most people won’t have a good experience.”