Valve thinks Arm has ‘potential’ for SteamOS handhelds, laptops, and more

Valve won’t talk about a Steam Deck 2. It probably wants to keep the attention on its just-announced living room console, comfy new controller, and Arm-based headset instead. But now that the company is preparing to sell an Arm headset, one that can even run Android apps, there’s an obvious question. Is Arm a one-off experiment for Valve, or might it power future SteamOS hardware?

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

But when I ask whether he thinks there’ll be other SteamOS devices with Arm chips, he says the answer is yes, and that he’s excited about it.

“I think that it paves the way for a bunch of different, maybe ultraportables, maybe more powerful laptops being Arm-based,” he begins. “Handhelds, 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 Nvidia reportedly has an Arm-powered gaming laptop coming, and how Razer showed up at Qualcomm’s last coming-out party for laptop chips.

“We’ll keep greasing the wheels, so to speak, so that SteamOS can work on a wider variety of Arm devices, but also so that the catalog becomes more reliable there in terms of compatibility and performance,” says Griffais.

Griffais tells me that companies are already reaching out to Valve about handhelds, and I happen to know that one of them, OneNetbook, has recently been experimenting with (and selling) powerful handheld-grade Arm chips, too.

But again, Valve isn’t talking about the Steam Deck 2 today, and I get the sense that Griffais may not see enough power in Arm handheld chips just yet — at least not for a “generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life” like Valve promised for the Steam Deck’s successor.

“When you get into lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that maybe is competitive with x86 offerings in that segment,” he tells me earlier in our conversation.

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