Having spent the bulk of my handheld gaming time with the Steam Deck, it was a bit of a shock last year to discover that PC gaming isn’t just possible on Android phones and retro handhelds, it’s powering on in leaps and bounds.
I’ve seen so many different games running beautifully, from older AAA titles like Tomb Raider and Prey (2017), all the way to more demanding ones like RDR2 and even Cyberpunk 2077 (no surprise that the last one is still an imperfect experience, as things stand…but it is possible!).
GameNative lets you play all manner of PC games on Android from GOG, Epic, and Steam.
I reached out to my friend Utkarsh, who is the lead developer of GameNative to ask if he wanted to share his story and let me interview him.
His background in development and gaming through to how GameNative started and is built, all the way to what the future might bring for his program. This is an interview on what I think might be at least part of the future of handheld gaming, and I hope you find this interesting:
https://gardinerbryant.com/i-genuinely-feel-gamenative-could-replace-handheld-pcs/
It probably will, for some people, at least until Valve releases an ARM-powered Deck running full SteamOS.
I think Android is the weak link here. Who wants to use an increasingly locked down operating system?
What’s the alternative? Keep in mind: we’re talking about a primary phone used for calls, texts, navigation, banking, payments, photography, and social media.
Yeah imagine spending all this time getting it all set up to one day have an update that breaks literally everything. That would suck…
And android seems to not get any better, just more locked down.
100%. An android device will recieve updates for 7 years in the best case scenario (on average more like 4 years), while a steamdeck is fully supported with mainline Linux, so it’ll continue to recieve support for 20 years at a minimum (support for 486 CPU’s from the early 90’s are only just now being dropped).
True, the only gaming focused custom rom I’m aware of is Gamma OS, and while it’s a great effort, the lone developer is not keeping up with the plethora of devices coming out.
Right now the Linux distros for these devices are weak JELOS-style barebones types. I’m looking forward to the days when I can run full fledged Debian-based distros on these.
The Steam Frame is ARM powered. They already released a beta of Proton 11 which can run on ARM. People already have tested it on ARM handhelds like the Odin2 with Rocknix and can launch the Steam store.
If it ends up running well on AYN Thor I might finally upgrade from my 3DS, but one of the only videos I saw tried running Hi-Fi Rush and it didn’t launch, all the other examples were indies which I assume are playable anyway.
It’s not about who wants it. People are already in posesssion of this device. And a lot more are buying them - the number of windows pc users has been plummeting lately, and it’s not in favour of linux but mobile os’es. So if you already posses the device ( walled garden or not ) why not use it as a handheld.
Problem is this whole article reads like an ad:
Gimme a break with all this glazing.
Non-gaming PC/Windows users are going down, but PC gamers are at all time highs and still growing.
Considering that this is partially thanks to Valve’s support of the FEX translation layer (x86 to ARM) I think it’s inevitably the next step after testing the waters with the Steam Frame.
I feel the same. Seems like you can easily install something like RockNIX on one of those handhelds running Android, but having a big name like Valve releasing an ARM-powered Switch Lite looking handheld would really push things.
Cannot remember when the last time was that I was that excited for the future of gaming :)