Valve’s quiet bankrolling of open-source emulation tools could make it heaps easier to play your PC games library on a humble smartphone, though it sounds like Gabe-made SteamOS phones are unlikely to be joining the company’s growing hardware catalogue. In an interview with The Verge, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed that they’ve been funding the development of Fex – a free compatibility tool that gets Windows apps functioning on mobile ARM processors – since well before revealing the ARM-based Steam Frame standalone VR headset.
Valve’s bundling Fex into SteamOS so the Frame, due in 2026, can run Steam games straight off the headset’s internal chip. But it is already out in the wild right now – i.e. GitHub –, and has a promising future in bringing those very same games to Android phones. Just not, Griffais says, phones with a Steam logo on them.
“I don’t know if that’s going to be a big focus for us to develop local content or try to develop SteamOS for devices like that” he explains. “I mean, I’m not discounting any possibility, but I think with just living room, handheld, and desktop, trying to have a good outcome for gaming applications and everything else you’d want to do in a desktop, we have a ton of work to do.”
The living room and handheld formats clearly refer to, respectively, the upcoming Steam Machine and the existing Steam Deck. But these are both based on x86 processors, much like a regular Windows PC or laptop. It’s ARM hardware, the diesel to x86’s unleaded, that Fex and the Frame are trying to crack – with at least some success, judging by the slickness with which Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong ran on the Frame when I tried it at Valve’s offices last month.
Steam phone or no, Fex may fulfil that promise of Steam games on mobile. It is, for instance, one of multiple x86 emulation layers employed by Gamehub, an Android game launcher app produced by Chinese peripheral makers GameSir. I’ve tried this on my Pixel 9 and admittedly haven’t had much luck, even with the games I know work well on the Steam Frame: Hades 2 crashes immediately and Silksong gets stuck on an endless launching screen. Also, there’s a non-zero possibility that I’ve handed over my Gmail and Steam account details to the Chinese Communist Party. C’est la vie. You don’t have to look far, mind, for folks who’ve used Gamehub to get Androidified Steam games up and running, including the author of that Verge piece.
Hopefully this cross-device compatibility push continues apace; Valve obviously have a business interest in getting Steam games (uhhhh, sorry Horses) playable on as many computery doohickeys as possible, but kicking down compatibility barriers and spreading software across devices of the user’s choosing is good for the common gamesplayer as well.
