Gaming

31231 readers

58 users here now

From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!

Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.

See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Why doesn't Steam support Android? (feddit.org)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

102 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Steam revenue estimated 2024: $10.8B

Google Play Store gaming revenue 2024: ~$31B

Why doesn't Valve want a part of that? I mean they already have an Android app. Several, actually. I realize there's some amount of investment but surely the payoff is worth it, and they have the necessary funds and skills? I mean if F-Droid can do it with nothing but volunteers and grants...?

Certainly plenty of games won't lend themselves well to the mobile experience but also plenty of them do.

From a personal perspective: I don't really care a whole lot for mobile games but I do like Balatro and want to play it on my phone, but if I want to do that I have to buy another license, which I can't even do because I don't run Google Play Services.

Epic got in on this already. Where's Valve?

Edit: my reflections on this conversation:

Valve could distribute their own app like Epic but they'd also probably have to remove it from the Play Store because now a cross-platform game would give them an Android version, thus breaking Google's ToS. So would doing such a thing outweigh lost sales from the Google version, and would it impact customer satisfaction? I wonder how many people are actually purchasing PC games in the Steam Android app...?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

It's not that simple. Proton implements the Windows API functions required to run a Windows game on x64-based Linux, but it's not a CPU emulator. Emulating x64 on ARM at the speeds required by a game is virtually impossible.

If Steam comes to ARM / Android, it would have to be a whole separate ecosystem of games. But Valve is late to the game there since we already have several players on that market, not least the standard Google Play Store.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

Emulating x64 on ARM at the speeds required by a game is virtually impossible.

This has been done and it works reasonably well on a case by case basis.

Much like protondb they have a list of confirmed broken and working games.

https://box86.org/app/