Valve rumored to be working on Android emulator for Steam

Agent Karyo@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 366 points –
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Valve throwing some money/developer time at Waydroid would be awesome

As far as I understand that's exactly what's been happening behind the scenes.

That'd be great, since it's basically broken as-is.

SteamDeck, emulate everything.*

  • Proton technically isn't emulation, but it's pretty crazy that the device basically doesn't have anything natively built for it, everything is translated emulated. It took that much effort to break Microsoft's PC gaming monopoly.

The Deck is what have me the confidence to move to Linux on desktop. I wouldn't have switched if not for Valve.

translation is kind of native though. It is almost like porting a winfows app to linux in real time, on the fly. It is pretty cool

Yeah it's pretty cool. Sometimes the translation can even beat native performance.

Sadly that's mostly true, but that may have more to do with devs lack of experience with Linux in general. Often they would have to outsource the port to Aspyr or another team.

Regardless of what the website says, waydroid isn't an emulator by any meaningful definition.

It's a container that runs on top of your regular linux kernel (with some very cool desktop integration features), java/kotlin applications run as natively as they'd run on your phone.

That's interesting. I didn't know that. I tried working with Waydroid once on Bazzite on an older desktop of mine and didn't get terribly far with it.

Guess they want to make it easy for mobile devs to launch their games on steam. Not sure if there's a market for it though.

Don't these guys have phones??? (Blizzard style)

Uhh.. for their steam deck I'd think 😂 not that it'd be a primarily mobile gaming device, but no reason not to put your mobile games on it if you like them

Maybe a start for their own Android store? And later an iOS store perhaps? (Although that's an entire different can of worms, regulations and apples)

No idea why it's difficult to run android on PC in the first place. Windows 11 can do it, but I'm clinging to 10 until it's gone.

Still pisses me off, this was one of the reasons I updated and they half-assed the implemenation then said they're killing it because no one is using it... no shit no one is using it, you hid it it behind the Amazon App (that no one uses) in the MS Store (that no one uses) and layers of docs for sideloading.

It's been around in one form or another since the Windows Phone 10 days, it was a weird beta that would sometimes work and required a lot of faffing about.

Have you heard the good news about Linux?

It is still surprisingly far from straightforward to get it working

EDIT: I mean Android on Linux is difficult. Not Linux itself.

Fair enough. I'm just fulfilling Lemmy's contractual obligation to mention Linux any time someone doesn't want to "upgrade" to Windows 11.

Linus pays me $100 a month for spamming Linux. You also get payed, right?

Every. Fucking. Thread.

"Hey instead of complaining about a few minor annoyances on Windows, why not just switch to Linux?"

Like I have many uses for Linux and appreciate it, but the amount of suggestions that I see telling someone that Linux is the fix is way too many

The point here is that MS made a pretty killer feature that was easy to set up, and it failed because nobody used it.

In the end you are still at the mercy of their shareholders and their core mission of EEE over end-user empowerment. Every thing they build is designed with lock-in and obfuscation to protect themselves.

I fear becoming that guy, can you call me out if I do? Cheers.

Hmm something about this has me fantasizing about a phone sized deck. But considering Valves development of VR and this development, I think they are going to tap into the android based VR dev pool for porting titles to an official Android on Steam platform.

I would like if someone managed Valve right and made HL3.

Valve makes infinitely more money off of store fees selling other people's games. Why would they want to make a fraction developing a single game when they can go after Android's 30% cut?

...So they have no issue burning a few million on HL3 knowing its a sunk cost to maybe keep some of the talent that has been leaving the company?

The thing is, Valve works mostly as a collective with mostly flat structure. So there can't be a higher up ordering people around to make HL3. The whole team needs to believe in it.

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If this means I can play my Steam games on my phone... Yay! 🎉

More like the other way round.

You can stream steam games to your phone with steam link thought.

Wait, but Steam doesn't have Android games, right?

Yet

While I welcome Android games on Steam, a part of me is repulsed by how Android game devs treat their customers; in-game ads, horrendous amount of mtx, p2w. Not saying that Steam games don't suffer mtx but it's way lesser.

Anyway, let's see how it goes.

The main problem is the amount of REALLY bad games. It's very hard to find decent games, most of them are intentionally unplayable garbage.

We need a dedicated Green Light with Dev guidelines for Android games. Or at least a separate store section for them. I really don't want to get flooded by low-effort mobile games.

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Yeah. Stream your android games from your phone to your steam deck so you can stream them to your phone!

Which is what they're rumored to be working on. Hence the post.

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You can sort of do that with Winlator, but it's pretty early tech!

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