Valve believes Arm has “potential” for SteamOS mobile devices, laptops, and more

Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais makes it seem like the sky’s the limit. I don’t want to overstate what he said, he was excited about it possiblenot any specific devices, and you’ll see that in a larger context when we publish the interview later this week.

But when I asked him if he thought there would be other SteamOS devices with Arm chips, he said the answer was yes, and he was excited about it.

“I think it paves the way for a different group, maybe small form factor laptops, maybe more powerful arm-based laptops,” he begins. “Mobile devices, there’s a lot of potential for Arm, of course, and one might see desktop chips as well at some point in the Arm world.” I immediately think about how to do this Nvidia reportedly has an Arm-powered gaming laptopAnd how Razer has appeared At Qualcomm’s recent laptop chip event.

“We’ll continue to grease the wheels, so to speak, so that SteamOS can run on a wide range of Arm hardware, but also so that the catalog becomes more reliable out there in terms of compatibility and performance,” Greaves says.

But again, Valve isn’t talking about Steam Deck 2 today, and I have a feeling that Griffais may not see enough power in Arm’s mobile chips only yet — at least not for a “generational leap in computing without sacrificing battery life” like Valve promised for its Steam Deck successor.

“When you get down to lower power, anything below the Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that’s probably competitive with the x86 offerings in that segment,” he told me earlier in our conversation.

I like to imagine Griffais was winking when he said “Anything less than the Steam Deck,” but his camera was off.