Valve appear to be testing ARM64 and Android support for Steam on Linux

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2024-09-22 23:30:03

Valve appear to have some pretty ambitious future plans for Steam, as we've seen recently in a leak (and not for the first time) that Valve has plans for ARM64 and Android support on Linux.

As usual, the leaks come thanks to SteamDB, which scrapes everything possible related to Steam. The latest "ValveTestApp3043620" appears to show various VR and standard non-VR games being tested on ARM64 with Proton (the Windows to Linux compatibility layer). When you scroll down the list it shows this is thanks to an open source project called FEX, which "allows you to run x86 and x86-64 binaries on an AArch64 host". It also mentions Waydroid, an open source container system that allows you to run Android apps and games on a Linux-based system.

Before people think it's about any Windows and macOS stuff here, it seems very specific to Linux. The configuration text mentions how it's from Windows to Linux.

Initially, I thought this would have been purely for the long-rumoured "Deckard" VR headset, which I believe based on previous leaks will have a standalone mode that runs Linux (with an Arm processor) as well as being able to be hooked up to a PC. So it would make a lot of sense for Valve to be working on a system like this to extend Proton support to ARM64 and get Android-based apps / games working as well.