This Steam VR recreation comes with the Android model totally free
After the boring thump of the Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional and a tepid response to the costlier Quest 3, digital actuality gaming appears to be in a lurch, and I’m kinda nervous. However the Steam Body headset, a {hardware} cousin to the Steam Deck and incoming Steam Machine, would possibly simply flip issues round. And an up to date VR recreation has shed some attention-grabbing gentle on what it would imply for builders.
Comply with together with me right here, this one has some fairly deep context. The Steam Body is a standalone VR headset just like the Meta Quest sequence, which runs on a Qualcomm Arm chip and has its personal battery and head-mounted monitoring cameras. That’s in stark distinction to Valve’s earlier VR {hardware} just like the Index, which wants to hook up with a PC to play video games or different packages.
The brand new Body will additionally hook up with gaming PCs for full-powered digital actuality. But it surely makes use of an onboard, ARM-based model of Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS that’s designed to run native video games in a conveyable, comparatively low-power format.
This creates some attention-grabbing prospects, particularly for cellular video games, particularly particularly for Android video games. See, the Meta Quest runs a closely modified model of Android for its working system and video games. So not solely wouldn’t it be pretty simple to port hundreds of Android video games on the Play Retailer over to an ARM-based Steam Body, it could be an incredible match for just about any recreation on the Quest as properly. And plenty of of these builders are already conversant in Valve’s VR techniques in Steam. It’s no marvel Valve is courting Android builders for a brand new Steam push.
Now, with all that in thoughts: A VR recreation on Steam issued an replace that pushes out the Android model to house owners totally free. Particularly it’s the well-reviewed Walkabout Mini Golf, and the replace was noticed by Twitter/X consumer and VR fanatic Brad Lynch (by way of PCGamer). In response to the sport’s official replace log from earlier this week, the complete APK file (the Android equal of an EXE) is now bundled into the obtain. The obtain isn’t talked about within the recreation’s replace textual content, it’s solely seen on SteamDB for now.
That appears to point that the developer is pushing the Android model of the sport (presumably a modified model of the sport that seems on the Android-based Meta Quest headsets) out to the Steam platform. Precisely why isn’t spelled out by the developer, however Lynch speculates that Valve may use one thing like Waydroid, an open-source instrument for operating Android packages on Linux, to get it up and operating on the Steam Body’s model of SteamOS. Valve makes use of the same method to Home windows video games with no Linux model, the extremely environment friendly Proton compatibility layer.
It’s arduous to attract any conclusions primarily based on developer changelogs. With out remark from the developer and/or Valve itself, we’re studying tea leaves right here. But it surely looks like a secure guess that builders who have already got PC-based VR video games on Steam, and people who promote VR video games on different platforms like Quest, PlayStation VR, and the upcoming Android XR, will probably be desperate to get the identical video games operating on the stand-alone Steam Body headset too.
