SteamOS continues its gradual unfold throughout the PC gaming panorama

Over time, Valve sees that type of assist increasing to different Arm-based gadgets, too. “This is already fully open source, so you could download it and run SteamOS, now that we will be releasing SteamOS for Arm, you could have gaming on any Arm device,” Valve Engineer Jeremy Selan told PC Gamer in November. “This is the first one. We’re very excited about it.”

It’s an particularly thrilling prospect when you think about the wide range of Arm-based Android gaming handhelds that at present exist throughout the value and efficiency spectrum. While emulators like Fex can technically let gamers entry Steam video games on these sorts of handhelds, official Arm assist for SteamOS may result in a veritable Cambrain explosion of {hardware} choices with native SteamOS assist.

Valve appears conscious of this potential, too. “There’s 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 lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that maybe is competitive with x86 offerings in that segment. We’re pretty excited to be able to expand PC gaming to include all those options instead of being arbitrarily restricted to a subset of the market.”

That’s nice information for followers of PC-based gaming handhelds, simply because the announcement of Valve’s Steam Machine will present a handy choice for SteamOS entry on the lounge TV. For desktop PC avid gamers, although, rigs sporting Nvidia GPUs would possibly stay the ultimate frontier for SteamOS within the foreseeable future. “With Nvidia, the integration of open-source drivers is still quite nascent,” Griffais told Frandroid a couple of 12 months in the past. “There’s still a lot of work to be done on that front… So it’s a bit complicated to say that we’re going to release this version when most people wouldn’t have a good experience.”