Elon Musk, the boss Teslaannounced that the company was making progress in Integrating Steam into your vehicles. This isn’t the first time that Tesla vehicles have offered official support for video games, but Valve’s client integration is big talk.
Tesla already offers some video game series like the popular Cuphead and Sonic the Hedgehog 1 through Tesla Arcade, but it seems that the automaker wants to offer a lot more Steam client integrations. This move may sound crazy at first, but the truth is that it could make a lot of sense if we consider certain technological movements that have been happening around Steam in recent years.
While Windows remains the undisputed king playing games, Valve has maneuvered a lot over the last decade to get Linux in the sector. After some Steam Machines that turned out to be failures, the Steam Deck seems to have come together a little better, a fact that opened the door to the definitive consolidation of Linux as a gaming platform, although not without some tricks.
What does Steam Deck have to do with Tesla electric cars? Apparently nothing, but if we say so the operating system of Tesla cars is based on Linux and that the brand’s latest models use AMD Ryzen processors with RDNA 2 graphics technology, things start to become clearer because the technology base is similar. In other words, everything is very feasible in terms of software and architecture, especially since Steam for Linux is more than consolidated, so the question focuses mainly on the power of Tesla vehicles when it comes to running video games.
In addition to titles compiled for Linux, Steam makes available Proton, a Wine-based compatibility layer that makes it easy to run Windows video games on Linux and macOS. The aforementioned compatibility layer is mainly responsible for improving Linux Gaming by allowing many video games compiled for Windows to run on a foreign system. On the other hand, quite a few cases have served to keep alive titles whose Linux ports have been abandoned for years.
Tesla’s intentions to integrate the Steam client into its vehicles come from as far back as Elon Musk himself he tweeted in February of this year that society wasworking on the general case of how steam games work on tesla vs. specific titles“. This message from the mogul most likely indicated an intention to run triple-A games through Steam instead of praying that they arrive ported specifically for electric vehicles.
And does it make sense to have Steam in the car? Of course, not for the driver, but for passengers it can be an interesting addition, especially if they are regular gamers and the journey is long. Why wait for a sequel to The Witcher 3 when you can continue playing on the go? It’s true that there is supposed to be a Steam Deck for this, but here we enter the field of individual preferences.
At this point, it might be worth recalling the arrival of Steam on ChromeOS using the previously mentioned consolidation of the client on Linux and the existence of Proton.
