For the longest time, the idea of playing PC games on your Android phone has been little more than a pipe dream, outside of a few Google Play launches for games such as Stardew Valley, Minecraft, and others. However, it looks like Valve, the brand behind Steam and the Steam Deck, is trying to make it a reality, with one of the gaming brand's regular spokespeople detailing the drive to bring PC games to mobile.
In an interview with The Verge, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais revealed that the company is funding various open-source technology projects to make Steam games playable on ARM chips. For those that don't know, you can find ARM chips in plenty of pocketable devices, including the top picks from our guide to the best gaming phones, so this would massively expand on Steam's potential user base.
One of the reasons behind this drive to make ARM devices compatible with Steam games is the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset, which utilizes the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset as some of last year's most powerful gaming phones. This particular project, which Griffais refers to as Fex, combines with Proton to make the Frame capable of running x86 games on ARM hardware. In simple terms, Valve is working behind the scenes to create emulators capable of bridging the gap between PC and Android compatibility, and we should see the results when the Steam Frame launches in the near future.
With all this in mind, it could be just a matter of time until we can play the best Steam Deck games on Android phones and tablets, though they might not offer the same level of performance as the handheld. Mobile chips are getting more and more impressive, but they still can't offer the same level of GPU and CPU performance as some of the AMD and Intel chips inside Valve's handheld and some of the more expensive Steam Deck alternatives. I'd love to play Baldur's Gate 3 on mobile, but not if it runs at 5fps.
It was around this time last year that we heard that Valve was planning on bringing SteamOS, the Steam Deck's operating system, to more handhelds, and we've already seen that come to fruition with devices such as the Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS. Given that success, we think it's likely that Valve pulls off bringing the Steam library to mobile, but we'll have to wait and see.