Gaming

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

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Ulrich@feddit.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

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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...?

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[–] Chesckers@lemmy.zip 24 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Maybe, just maybe, they are waiting for proton for ARM to be a thing.

Imagine having actually a big percentage of your steam games just work on android. Now that would be disruptive for the market.

If it worked like I imagine it would.

[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months 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.

[–] Toes@ani.social 9 points 4 months 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/

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