I'm 98% certain a Steam Deck 2 would be ARM based and steam will be working towards getting proton or something similar to work for x86-64 -> ARM. Mainly for battery life gains. I think they've realised that the biggest complaint that people have of the steam deck is that it just does not last long enough when playing higher end games. Getting both a good ARM chipset and an efficient translator will make massive gains.

This news to me almost confirms this theory of mine and they're just also trying to see if the same strategy can work with getting them on people's phones and tablets too.

[–] vikingtons@lemmy.world 5 points 4 hours ago

I think you'd be incorrect but I'm glad to see focus on other ISAs nonetheless.

I'm not sure the power efficiency argument in favour of RISC really holds up today; Lunar lake has demonstrated that x86 can achieve stellar perf / watt at lower power envelopes. It doesn't quite meet apple (testimony to their own proficiency though they benefit from vertical integration) but comfortably pulls ahead of Qualcomm in this regard.

But being able to use your desktop software on any target, regardless of ISA or OS? Sign me the fuck up.

[–] CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 hours ago

If this goes through, it'll be a game changer. I really was hoping a similar push from Epic considering they've pushed for alternative stores on mobile platforms and also can offer competitive pay shares to devs that use Unreal; but titles that joined its mobile store are very limited. They're cool titles for sure; but Steam really has a chance to compete really hard with this news. And Epic has no excuse of "no we can't use that backend Steam uses to translats games"; it's literally open source.