(Credit: Valve)
Valve has been quietly funding the development of open-source technology that will allow people to play Windows games on Arm, The Verge reports, and the Steam Frame offers some solid clues about what Valve has planned.
Alongside the announcement of the new Steam Machine earlier this year, Valve also debuted the Steam Frame, a next-generation VR headset powered by Arm hardware. While its wireless Windows streaming capabilities are arguably the most exciting aspect for PC VR users, its onboard Arm chip hints at Valve's real goal with the system: Making it capable of streaming from anywhere, from phones to laptops to tablets.
This has been a long-term goal for Valve. In an interview with The Verge, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais says the company is behind Fex, an x86-to-Arm emulator that dates back to 2018 and allows people to play PC game on Arm devices. But its involvement in these open-source projects started in 2016.
"All the core [Fex] developers have been funded by us since the beginning," Griffais says. "We definitely started that project with the idea that it would be something that’s useful for the ecosystem at large, but also something that would be really useful for SteamOS and other applications in the future."
That support has allowed Fex's lead developer, Ryan Houdek, to make it his full-time job. "I want to thank the people from Valve for being here from the start and allowing me to kickstart this project," Houdek wrote in a recent post celebrating Fex's seven-year anniversary. "They trusted me with the responsibility of designing and frameworking the project in a way that it can work long-term [and remain] an open project that anyone can adapt for their own use cases."
This means that in the future, you could be playing Steam games on your phone, your tablet, a laptop running an Arm processor, a range of VR headsets, and anything else using Arm hardware. Although Valve has said it isn't developing its own Arm devices beyond the Steam Frame for now, other manufacturers are showing interest in SteamOS for their own devices.
Griffais says that "paves the way for a bunch of different, maybe ultraportables, maybe more powerful laptops being Arm-based," adding, "There’s a lot of potential for Arm."
It Google and Apple are ultimately forced to open up their mobile ecosystems, we could see Steam Games and Epic Game Store games run on those devices in the future without any kind of sideloading, TechSpot notes. Arm-based Linux phones can already run games using Fex and the Proton translation layer. It's only the platform holders that are stopping that from becoming a reality on all phones.