Valve is welcoming Android video games into Steam

You can consider the just-announced Steam Frame as a wi-fi VR headset to your PC, or a Steam Deck to your face. But one other manner to consider it’s that Valve is lastly coming into the cellular realm. The Frame doesn’t simply run Windows video games on its Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chip — Valve will now assist and encourage builders to carry their Android apps to Steam as properly.

It’ll attempt to make a few of them first-class residents, too, Valve engineer Jeremy Selan tells The Verge. “From the user’s perspective, our preference is that they don’t even have to think about it, they just have their titles on Steam, they download them and hit play.”

Valve says the Steam Frame can use the identical Android APKs builders already use to carry their apps to telephones and Android-based VR headsets such because the Meta Quest — and it’s launching a Steam Frame developer equipment program to assist put the {hardware} in builders’ palms.

It feels like Valve is particularly hoping to draw a few of these Meta VR recreation builders, somewhat than simply any form of Android app you may discover on a pill or telephone. “They’re really VR developers who want to publish their VR content, and they’re porting a mobile VR title where they’re already familiar with how to make those APKs,” says Selan. “They are now free to bring those to Steam, and they’ll just work on this device.”

In phrases of efficiency, Selan suggests it needs to be glorious as a result of the code is working natively. While Valve’s SteamOS just isn’t Android and desires to make use of its Proton compatibility layer to make apps really feel at house, the Arm code will run on an Arm processor while not having translation first.

When I ask about Android apps past video games — and point out how I’d actually prefer to see issues like Discord voice chat in Steam, not simply Wallpaper Engine — Valve appears rather less positive. “We’ve never disinvited people from doing that,” says Valve’s Lawrence Yang. “We are a games company and we are focused on games, but like you said, there are a lot of things on Steam that are tools, software like Blender for instance.”

Selan chimes in, “We don’t have it quite working to show you today, but our intention is to have rich browser integration, so at any point you’ll be able to bring up a browser, have floating windows, all of the multitasking environments you’d expect, so you could certainly go to any website and have those apps present.

“I know there’s a difference between that and what you asked, but we expect that will bridge a lot of that gap.”

Will there be a method to rapidly launch these internet apps from Steam, and let customers flip them into buttons, maybe? “That’s our hope. I don’t want to promise that for launch, but that’s our hope,” Selan says.

Valve likes to construct for the lengthy haul, and I’d be shocked if its plans start and finish at Android-based VR video games for the Steam Frame. I believe that is extra possible the tip of the iceberg. For one factor, it’s wanting like Google will quickly be pressured to open up Android to various app shops, so Steam may quickly be capable to simply promote video games on telephones similar to its rival Epic has been attempting to do.

In the in the meantime, Gamers Nexus reports that you just’ll additionally be capable to sideload Android APKs onto the Steam Frame, too.

But Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais additionally hints that there’s potential in bringing SteamOS to different units with Arm chips, not less than sometime. He tells me he thinks the Steam Frame paves the best way for SteamOS to work on “a wider variety of Arm devices,” together with laptops, and that Arm clearly has “a lot of potential” in future handhelds.