After the dull thump of the Apple Vision Pro and a tepid response to the more expensive Quest 3, virtual reality gaming seems to be in a lurch, and I’m kinda worried. But the Steam Frame headset, a hardware cousin to the Steam Deck and incoming Steam Machine, might just turn things around. And an updated VR game has shed some interesting light on what it might mean for developers.
Follow along with me here, this one has some pretty deep context. The Steam Frame is a standalone VR headset like the Meta Quest series, which runs on a Qualcomm Arm chip and has its own battery and head-mounted tracking cameras. That’s in stark contrast to Valve’s previous VR hardware like the Index, which needs to connect to a PC to play games or other programs.
The new Frame will also connect to gaming PCs for full-powered virtual reality. But it uses an onboard, ARM-based version of Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS that’s designed to run local games in a portable, relatively low-power format.
This creates some interesting possibilities, especially for mobile games, especially especially for Android games. See, the Meta Quest runs a heavily modified version of Android for its operating system and games. So not only would it be fairly easy to port thousands of Android games on the Play Store over to an ARM-based Steam Frame, it would be a great fit for pretty much any game on the Quest as well. And many of those developers are already familiar with Valve’s VR systems in Steam. It’s no wonder Valve is courting Android developers for a new Steam push.
Now, with all that in mind: A VR game on Steam issued an update that pushes out the Android version to owners for free. Specifically it’s the well-reviewed Walkabout Mini Golf, and the update was spotted by Twitter/X user and VR enthusiast Brad Lynch (via PCGamer). According to the game’s official update log from earlier this week, the full APK file (the Android equivalent of an EXE) is now bundled into the download. The download isn’t mentioned in the game’s update text, it’s only visible on SteamDB for now.
That seems to indicate that the developer is pushing the Android version of the game (presumably a modified version of the game that appears on the Android-based Meta Quest headsets) out to the Steam platform. Exactly why isn’t spelled out by the developer, but Lynch speculates that Valve could use something like Waydroid, an open-source tool for running Android programs on Linux, to get it up and running on the Steam Frame’s version of SteamOS. Valve uses a similar approach to Windows games with no Linux version, the highly efficient Proton compatibility layer.
It’s hard to draw any conclusions based on developer changelogs. Without comment from the developer and/or Valve itself, we’re reading tea leaves here. But it seems like a safe bet that developers who already have PC-based VR games on Steam, and those who sell VR games on other platforms like Quest, PlayStation VR, and the upcoming Android XR, will be eager to get the same games running on the stand-alone Steam Frame headset too.
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