Over time, Valve sees this support expanding to other Arm-based devices. “It's already completely open source, so you can download it and run SteamOS, and now that we release SteamOS for Arm, you can play on any Arm device,” Valve engineer Jeremy Celan. told PC Gamer in November. “This is the first one. We're very excited about it.”
Imagine if portable devices like the Retroid Pocket Flip 2 could run SteamOS instead of Android…
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This is a particularly exciting prospect considering Wide range of Arm-based Android gaming handhelds which currently exist across the price and performance spectrum. Bye emulators like Fex could technically give players access to Steam games on such portable devices, official SteamOS support on Arm could lead to a veritable Cambrian explosion of hardware capabilities with SteamOS support built-in.
Valve also seems to recognize this potential. “There are many price points and power points where Arm-based chipsets are better able to serve the market,” Valve's Pierre-Louis Griffet. told The Verge last month. “When you get down to lower power, anything lower than a Steam Deck, I think you'll find that there's an Arm chip that can perhaps compete with the x86 offerings in that segment. We're really excited about the opportunity to expand PC gaming to include all of these options rather than arbitrarily limiting them to a subset of the market.”
This is great news for fans of PC-based gaming laptops, as well as announcement of Valve's Steam Machine will provide a convenient way to access SteamOS on your living room TV. For desktop gamers, however, machines with Nvidia GPUs may remain the last frontier for SteamOS for the foreseeable future. “At Nvidia, open source driver integration is still in its early stages,” Griffeis. said to Frandroid about a year ago. “There's still a lot of work to be done on that front… So it's a little difficult to say we're going to release this version when most people aren't going to have a good experience.”
