Steam OS on Android

Valve recently announced 3 new hardware devices. The new Steam Machine, the new Steam Controllers and a new VR headset. All of these are very exciting and everyone seems to be particularly excited about the new console. With the slow death of xbox there's a huge gap in the market and Valve is looking to take advantage. This plan has been a decade in the making, with Valve heavily contributing to the Proton project, which is the major project bringing windows game emulation to Linux. I myself switched to Linux as my main operating system (arch btw) recently and there's no going back. 99% of my game library is playable on Linux and the rest are multiplayer games that I boot into windows for. 

So the Steam Machine will bring the power of Linux to the console market and show people the light. I'm happy with the console for that reason, however that's not the hardware product I'm most excited about. My pc, which I built 4 years ago, is more powerful than the Steam Machine so I have use for it. I'm glad that it exists but I'm not planning to buy it. I hope game developers optimize their games using the steam machine as a target so that I can get good performance as well, but that's about where my excitement for it ends.

Let's talk about the Steam Controllers next. Gaming controllers (for pc) have mostly been xbox 360 copycats. If it ain't broke and all that. Including the newer xbox controllers. The original Steam Controllers were a radical departure from the 360 controller design but a bit too radical. The touchpad was great for mouse based games but not that good for regular games. Valve finally found a happy medium with the steam deck and now they're bringing it in a controller form. I love it, I've been looking to replace my old xbox series x controller for a while now but didn't want to buy just another one (nothing's wrong with my controller, just the thumbstick rubbers have worn off). I thought about upgrading to the elite controllers, but they're way too expensive for me to justify. I do like the paddles in the background for special controls though. So as long as steam controllers aren't as expensive as the elite controllers, I'll buy them in a heartbeat. They even have buttons on the back!

However, that's not the hardware announcement that got me the most excited. The most exciting announcement for me was the new Steam VR headset. But NOT because I like VR. Don't get me wrong, i enjoy VR from time to time, I still have my Meta Quest 2 around, but I'm excited about the VR headset for a completely different reason. 

The best announcement for me was that the VR headset was using an Snapdragon ARM based processor and that Steam OS was gonna run on it! 

So what? You may ask. What's the big deal about that?

Well it's not a big deal for everyone, but it is a big deal for me. It solves a very particular problem I have. 

I have my old Android phone lying around and I've been wanting to turn it into a steam deck for a while. I could just buy a steam deck but that would be an expensive purchase that I can't justify. But i do like the idea of being able to carry my games around and play them wherever. Sitting down on my pc to play a games is a bit too much of a commitment. Sometimes I just wanna lay on my bed, put on a podcast and grind a JRPG. I bought a couple of telescopic game controllers (well i bought a cheap one liked it a lot and bought a good one) and turned my old phone into an emulation machine. It can emulate games up to the PS2, so that's a huge array of games. 

"That sounds amazing", I hear you say. "So what's the problem?" 

We'll the problem is my love of achievements. I love achievements and getting them. I love playing through an entire game, grinding for the achievements and perfecting that game completely before uninstalling it. I talk about it more on my YouTube video here. It wasn't really a problem until I played final fantasy. I'm playing through all of the final fantasy games and so far I've finished 15, 16 and 1. It was when I finished 1 that it turned into a problem. Since I was playing it on Android i bought it on the play Store and played through the android version of the game. But I loved it so much i bought all of the final fantasy games on steam. I loved it so much I want to get all the achievements in all the final fantasy games on steam. That's a huge project. A lot of time commitment. I'm willing to do that, but man, would it amazing if I could do it playing on my phone instead of my pc. 

That's when my hunt began. I had to find a way to play steam games on my phone. I had 2 options. 

1. Emulate a PC

2. Steam link

There are ways to emulate pc games but they didn't have steam support, so no achievements. That's why I originally went with the steam link route. Steam link is a way to stream steam game from a pc to a phone. I obviously don't want to keep my pc running all the time (it would defeat the whole purpose of this project) so I got out my old laptop threw arch Linux on it and ran steam on it. Now I can play steam games on my phone through the laptop as long as I'm connected to the same wifi. This solved my problem but the issue was that the laptop was on the other side of the house so I don't get a strong connection. It's playable, since final fantasy is a turn based game, but it's not that great of an experience. 

Now we get to the present. Recently i discovered Gamehub. A app from the makers of GameSir (the good telescopic controller i bought). Gamehub let's me access my steam library on their app and then emulates the game for me to play. This solved all my problems. Now I can "natively" play steam games from my phone from wherever I want and still get achievements. A homemade steam deck! After i discovered Gamehub, i realised there were a couple of other apps that do this, but idk why I didn't find them before. Either way, this would not have been possible without the extensive contribution valve put into proton. Gamehub uses Fex drivers which is something valve is using for the Steam VR headset.

So now you understand why I was so excited about the steam vr headset announcement. Any improvements they do will improve my emulator's performance as well. Not only that but i suspect valve has bigger plans in mind for Android. I think valve will soon bring SteamOS to Android or rather your steam library to Android. I think Gamesir is helping them bring this plan to fruition because they'll be able to sell a lot of phone controllers. It's a wonderful win partnership. And steam of course gets to sell more games. 

- B1ackRose