Valve, the technology company behind the leading digital PC game sales platform Steam, and developers of PC gaming devices such as the Steam Deck portable console and the Steam Machine computer console, have recently been reported to be deploying their technological capabilities to try to bring these PC games to more types of devices, especially ARM.
With the launch of the Steam Frame virtual reality device in particular, it is known that this hardware will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor chip, an ARM processor chip. To run games on it, Valve has developed several technologies such as the Proton graphics engine rendering layer and the Fex emulator software to run PC games using the processor chip.
In an interview with The Verge, Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the developers of the SteamOS operating system, said that they not only developed the Proton technology, but also the Fex emulator software that is used.
In short, Valve is now seen to be in a situation where they are funding the development of the technology needed to make computer games easier to play on a variety of devices, and not just x86 computers powered by Intel and AMD processing chips.
According to him, with the development of technologies such as Fex and Proton, game developers will no longer need to build two variations of the game to maximize the number of users. They will only need to develop regular computer games, and use Proton and Fex to allow users to run their favorite games quickly and easily.
However, this may also mean that Valve will later through Steam will need to update their game store application to allow these games to run on users' Arm devices in the future.
