Valve just opened the door to Android games on Steam

Valve just announced some new Steam devices, including the Steam Frame headset. We previously heard that you can sideload Android APKs on the headset, and it turns out that Valve is also opening the door to Android games on Steam.

Valve told The Verge that it now supports and welcomes Android games on Steam, and that the Steam Frame supports the same APKs developers are already using to publish their games on mobile and Meta’s Quest VR headsets.

Of course, Meta Quest headsets run a modified version of Android. So this move seems like a wise strategy to ensure that games available on Meta headsets can easily be ported to Steam. This should make life easier for developers, as they don’t have to spend a ton of time creating a brand-new Steam Frame port of their games.

“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’s Jeremy Selan told the outlet.

Selan also noted that these games should deliver great performance on the Steam Frame as they’re effectively running natively (it’s Arm-based code on an Arm-based Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, after all). However, the company will still reportedly implement its Proton compatibility layer for an improved experience.

Interestingly, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais also told The Verge that the Steam Frame paves the way for SteamOS to run on “a wider variety of Arm devices.” He specifically hinted at laptops, but added that Arm had “a lot of potential” in future handheld machines.

These comments also broadly line up with Valve’s comments to Android Authority at CES early this year. The company told me that it was “definitely interested” in an Arm-based Steam OS device, such as a handheld. However, it added that this was something it eventually wanted to pursue in the long term as it didn’t have a “path to run on Arm” at the time. Needless to say, the Steam Frame’s Arm-based architecture suggests that Valve has indeed cleared a major technological hurdle.