As per some recent reports, Valve – the creator of Steam, SteamOS, and the Steam Deck, seems to be working on an ARM64 version of Proton. In other words, Steam Deck, the hit handheld gaming PC, may soon be able to run games that work well with Windows on Arm.
According to Tom’s Hardware, Valve is testing “literal hundreds” of games on the ARM64 Proton layer, which includes popular games such as Shadows of Mordor and Left 4 Dead. This was spotted on September 20th as Valve published updates to a test application that’s available on SteamDB. The list of games that have been tested for “proton-arm64ec-4” is a massive one, which indicates a wide range of possibilities.
Proton Arm compatibility on Steam
In case you didn’t know, Proton is Valve’s special compatibility layer, which helps users play Windows games on Linux devices seamlessly. So, for Linux gamers, this is good news, as it may indicate Valve may be planning to embrace Linux-based gaming devices.
In fact, it is possible that Valve may be planning to develop ARM64 Linux-based portable consoles. However, considering that Steam Deck is quite reasonably priced compared to other handheld PCs, a Linux-only version seems unlikely.
The other major possibility here is that the company might be gearing up to introduce SteamOS onto other devices or support ARM64 on SteamOS or Proton. The same report on Tom’s Hardware also states that some mentions of Waydroid were spotted, which may indicate that Proton support may be rolled out for Android Arm devices.
So far, we don’t really know what Valve has in mind with the ARM64 Proton layer, as it has not officially shared any details. However, it is indeed great news for people who like the ARM architecture and use it to game on. And in any case, it looks like Valve wants to expand its reach beyond just x86 devices.
