By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CN

Valve confirms it'll support the ROG Ally with its Steam Deck operating system

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2024-08-14 14:00:03

By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Valve once imagined that every PC maker could have their own "Steam Machine," a PC game console running the company's Linux-based SteamOS. It took a decade for that dream to evolve into the company's own internally developed Steam Deck gaming handheld, but the original dream isn't dead.

The company's long said it plans to let other companies use SteamOS, too — and that means explicitly supporting the rival Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld, Valve designer Lawrence Yang now confirms to The Verge.

A few days ago, some spotted an intriguing line in Valve's latest SteamOS release notes: “Added support for extra ROG Ally keys.” We didn't know Valve was supporting any ROG Ally keys at all, let alone extras!

Maybe Valve was just supporting those keys in the Steam desktop client on a Windows, where it offers a Steam Deck-like Big Picture Mode interface for any PC, and the line mistakenly made it into these patch notes? I asked to be safe.