You can think of the just-announced Steam Frame as a wireless VR headset for your PC, or a Steam Deck for your face. But another way to think about it is that Valve is finally entering the mobile realm. The Frame doesn’t just run Windows games on its Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chip — Valve will now support and encourage developers to bring their Android apps to Steam as well.
It’ll try to make some of them first-class citizens, too, Valve engineer Jeremy Selan tells The Verge. “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 says the Steam Frame can use the same Android APKs developers already use to bring their apps to phones and Android-based VR headsets such as the Meta Quest — and it’s launching a Steam Frame developer kit program to help put the hardware in developers’ hands.
It sounds like Valve is specifically hoping to attract some of those Meta VR game developers, rather than just any kind of Android app you might find on a tablet or phone. “They’re really VR developers who want to publish their VR content, and they’re porting a mobile VR title where they’re already familiar with how to make those APKs,” says Selan. “They are now free to bring those to Steam, and they’ll just work on this device.”
In terms of performance, Selan suggests it should be excellent because the code is running natively. While Valve’s SteamOS is not Android and needs to use its Proton compatibility layer to make apps feel at home, the Arm code will run on an Arm processor without needing translation first.
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When I ask about Android apps beyond games — and mention how I’d really like to see things like Discord voice chat in Steam, not just Wallpaper Engine — Valve seems a little less sure. “We’ve never disinvited people from doing that,” says Valve’s Lawrence Yang. “We are a games company and we are focused on games, but like you said, there are a lot of things on Steam that are tools, software like Blender for instance.”
Selan chimes in, “We don’t have it quite working to show you today, but our intention is to have rich browser integration, so at any point you’ll be able to bring up a browser, have floating windows, all of the multitasking environments you’d expect, so you could certainly go to any website and have those apps present.”
“I know there’s a difference between that and what you asked, but we expect that will bridge a lot of that gap.”
Will there be a way to quickly launch those web apps from Steam, and let users turn them into buttons, perhaps? “That’s our hope. I don’t want to promise that for launch, but that’s our hope,” Selan says.
Valve likes to build for the long haul, and I would be surprised if its plans begin and end at Android-based VR games for the Steam Frame. I think this is more likely the tip of the iceberg. For one thing, it’s looking like Google will soon be forced to open up Android to alternative app stores, so Steam might soon be able to easily sell games on phones just like its rival Epic has been trying to do.
In the meanwhile, Gamers Nexus reports that you’ll also be able to sideload Android APKs onto the Steam Frame, too.
But Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais also hints that there’s potential in bringing SteamOS to other devices with Arm chips, at least someday. He tells me he thinks the Steam Frame paves the way for SteamOS to work on “a wider variety of Arm devices,” including laptops, and that Arm obviously has “a lot of potential” in future handhelds.
