Valve has made changes to the test app visible on SteamDB, where it says it’s testing a large number of games with the Proton compatibility layer. In other words: Steam for ARM.

Valve is no stranger to the changes that happen every day in the technology industry (see Qualcomm’s move to buy Intel), and it aims to keep its digital video game business current, the most important on the planet for a decade. Another thing will be the support of the architecture, which will become more and more important in the PC.

Steam for ARM, inevitable

Gaming on ARM based PCs has been an almost impossible mission if we are talking about games of a certain level. Hardware-limited Qualcomm chips and Windows versions didn’t work. And without native titles for ARM, mandatory emulation was insufficient. Microsoft has released a feature update for Windows 11 24H2 (mainly aimed at Copilot+ PCs with ARM), with which it promises improvements and optimizations related to the launch of games and its Prism emulator.

Valve is no stranger to all these moves and everything indicates that it is preparing its service with the new ARM64 version of Proton. This emulator is used to be able to play Windows games on Linux, but here we are talking about generic version of Steam for ARM which would be used in Windows on ARM PCs.

The version of Proton listed on SteamDB is called ‘proton-arm64ec-4’ and appears in testing in hundreds of games, such as Left 4 Dead 2 or Shadows of Mordor. Although Valve has yet to make any official announcements regarding ARM64 support in SteamOS or for Proton, it clearly seems to be a priority and part of their Linux gaming efforts in general.

However, now it seems that Valve wants to expand its Linux gaming audience beyond x86 hardware and start incorporating ARM devices. First for Linux, but as previous step to run games on Windows. Another possibility is that even hundreds of millions of ARM Android devices could get Proton support, which would surely expand their audience significantly.

There is also talk on the internet about a special ARM version of her Steam Deck console. Honestly, the current version is cheap and remarkably well made. Frankly, we don’t see the need for a version that Valve has to start over with. Yes, that Steam support for ARM enables a new generation of machines yet to come.