is 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.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
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.
A transparent version of the Steam Frame. There’s an Arm phone chip underneath that black heat pipe and heat spreader. Photo by Everything Time Studio / The Verge
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.
Got any burning questions about Valve’s new hardware? We’re holding a subscriber-exclusive AMA today, November 12th, at 3PM ET. Drop your questions here and we’ll do our best to answer them.
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.”
... continue reading