Earlier this year, Qualcomm debuted its Snapdragon X series of Arm-based processors for Windows 11 PCs. Many major PC makers put the chip in new notebooks. However, even though Qualcomm said that most Windows PC games would "just work" on Snapdragon X Elite chips with the use of emulation, running Windows games on Snapdragon X-based notebooks has not been universal.
Now, there"s evidence that Steam, the biggest PC digital game store, may be in development for Arm-based PCs. A recent update from Valve in a test application was spotted on the third-party site SteamDB (via Tom"s Hardware) that showed a listing for "proton-arm64ec-4." That may indicate Valve is testing an Arm-based version of Proton, which is Valve"s layer for making Windows-based games playable on the Linux OS and specifically on the Linux-based Steam Deck handheld gaming PC.
The SteamDB page also seems to indicate that Valve is testing the Arm-based Proton with a number of PC games such as Left 4 Dead 2, Deep Rock Galactic, and many more. While its possible Valve could be testing these games to work on an Arm-based version of Steam Deck, it seems more likely that the company is working on a version of Steam that will run natively on the growing number of Arm-based Windows PCs.
As is usually the case with Valve, it has not mentioned officially that it is working on getting Steam to run on Arm-based PCs. It could be a while before such a port is revealed, let alone launched.
However, if an Arm-based version of Steam is indeed in the works, it could be even more evidence that Qualcomm"s efforts to expand its Snapdragon chips to Windows PCs are gaining more developer support. That might be bad for its big rivals AMD and especially Intel, who reportedly got a takeover offer from Qualcomm in recent days.