The Raspberry Pi 4 is an amazing device that has been gaining traction in recent years due to its affordability and impressive performance capabilities. It’s a powerful, low-cost computer ideal for a variety of uses, including gaming. But, is there any Steam functionality on The Foundation’s Raspberry Pi 4 model?

The answer is yes – with some caveats. In this article, we’ll discuss what it takes to get Valve’s gaming marketplace running on your Raspberry Pi 4 and how well it will perform once installed. There are several retro titles users can play via RetroPi, but without Steam, you’ll be missing out on some of the most celebrated experiences.

It’s one of the largest gaming marketplaces in the industry. Running it on your DIY device should be an achievement, but, unfortunately, nothing is simple in life. Getting Steam running properly won't be as simple as installing the program, given that it doesn't have a native ARM client to run on RPi. Thus, we must get our hands on a special program in order to have the official client running.

Before you start on that project, we must break it to you: this will not be a bug-free experience. A Raspberry Pi relies on the AArch64 architecture and Steam only has binaries available for x86 architecture. This means you'll have to run an emulator to let the gaming platform think the program is running on an x86 architecture platform. The nature of the emulator makes games run into a ton of errors.

If you want to learn how to install Steam on a device despite these constraints, pimylifeup.com has an extensive “how to” post that will take you to every step. They also advise on the many issues that you will run into via the emulator. Aside from that, there is also Steam Link that users can run on the Pi 4.

How do I use my Raspberry Pi 4 as a Steam Link?

After you launch the Steam Link app on the DIY system, you’ll experience virtually the same functions on an Android or iPhone. To begin, open the platform on your gaming PC, access the Settings menu from the Remote Play tab, and check the Enable Remote Play box. Lastly, launch Steam Link on the Raspberry Pi. 

This will ensure you can use your Raspberry Pi 4 to run Steam. It's not actually doing so, but using the device to act as a streaming device to run Steam is one of the most reliable ways to play Steam games on the device.

• Raspberry Pi 4 not powerful enough for you? Check out the lastest info on the Raspberry Pi 5!

About the Author

Camilo Delgado

Camilo is a contributor for PC Guide. He's been into tech since he was a teen, surfing through the web and local stores trying to find the cheapest way to play the latest Half-Life on his old Windows