Valve escaped Windows. Now Steam is breaking free from the PC itself

Valve spent the last decade making Windows optional for PC gaming. Now it wants to do the same thing to x86 — the Intel- and AMD-based CPU architecture at the heart of every gaming PC. If it succeeds, the resulting shake-up could change what “PC game” even means.

The Steam Deck proved Valve’s Proton compatibility layer could run an enormous library of Windows games on Linux without developers needing to port them to Linux first. That breakthrough helped make the Steam Deck a success. It also made Linux gaming legitimately viable, and laid the groundwork for SteamOS to spread to other PCs.

But the Steam Frame reveals that Valve’s ambitions go much deeper. The standalone VR headset runs SteamOS on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor based on the Arm architecture, rather than the x86 processors from AMD and Intel that have powered PC gaming for decades.

And Valve expects your existing x86 Windows games to run on it anyway. That’s why the Arm chip inside Steam Frame matters so much more than VR. Valve is starting to dismantle the fundamental assumptions about which hardware and software a gaming PC needs to run your games.