Valve Has the Secret to Playing Your Games Everywhere, and It’s Not Streaming

Microsoft has plagued the world with its “Xbox Everywhere” advertising. The company wants to convince us that all our devices—from our phone to our smart TV—can be an Xbox, so long as they have a Wi-Fi connection strong enough to stream games. Valve, out of the blue, is so close to offering an alternative to get all your game libraries working on any device you desire, without having to worry about internet speeds.

Both Microsoft and Valve have the same goal. They want to put as many players’ eyeballs and wallets in front of their respective platforms: Game Pass (and by extension the Xbox app) and Steam, respectively. Despite the difference in size between these companies (Valve reportedly has approximately 350 employees, while Microsoft has more than 228,000 worldwide), they are both desperate to get players stuck buying games on their markets. To that end, Valve wants more games on Steam, more players on Steam, and more platforms with Steam. Hell, it wants Android games on Steam, too.

Xbox recently raised the price of its Game Pass Ultimate subscription from $20 to $30 while also adding more streamable games to less expensive tiers. Game streaming will inevitably appeal to people who have lower-end hardware and who can’t hope to afford today’s inflated PC prices. Valve would rather you natively load any of your games on your preferred system, even if that’s your smartphone. It comes down to an emulator called Fex.

So why Fex, and why now?

The Steam Frame is using an ARM-based chip, necessitating Valve make games compatible with ARM. © Valve

Fex is an open-source emulator—meaning it runs the chip architecture in a digital environment. Sure, it’s open source, but that belies just how big a hand Valve had in its creation. In an interview with The Verge, Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais said work on Fex started more than seven years ago. The effort involved a slew of indie developers. One of those developers, Ryan H, wrote on his blog that Valve “trusted me with the responsibility of designing and frameworking the project in a way that it can work long term.” The whole point of this software is to do away with the concept of hardware exclusivity for gaming, a project Microsoft has been keen on these past few years.

Last month, Valve showed off the Steam Machine, a console-like box with PC guts, along with a Steam Frame VR headset. The secret sauce of the headset is down to its Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 CPU, a mobile-focused chip based on ARM microarchitecture. Valve claims the Frame will be able to play your Steam games, both over local streaming and through an open-source x86 emulator called Fex. When you put on a Steam Frame, it will be running SteamOS, same as the Steam Machine. It’s basically a Steam Deck for your face, but it’s much more distinct than that because of the underlying hardware.

ARM is a distinct form of RISC-based architecture compared to x86 found in the majority of PC processors. It’s known for its better power management and efficiency that’s especially good for mobile devices. Fex—ostensibly—bridges the gap between the two chip architectures. Fex is built with Steam in mind thanks to its support for Linux OS and the Vulkan system library. You probably haven’t seen any mention of Fex save for the compatibility layers in apps like GameHub or GameNative. Like Valve’s Proton before it, Fex could have a wider impact on the gaming industry, even if most users won’t know it’s running in the background.

More than a year ago, Qualcomm showed off Baldur’s Gate III running on a Snapdragon X Elite chip using emulation. Soon, that could become the norm for all once-incompatible games. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

While Fex (specifically Fex-Emu) is currently designed for Linux, a few tinkerers have been using a version to emulate PC games on Android through Steam on phones. There are several versions of Fex, including a FexCore, which, according to the dev’s Wiki page, “doesn’t really care about the operating environment.” There’s more work that needs to be done before we see more games running natively on Android.

There are more ARM-based devices available nowadays, especially with Qualcomm pushing its Snapdragon X PCs as well as relatively cheap gaming handhelds. Qualcomm itself keeps promoting the idea that users don’t need to do anything to make their current x86 programs compatible with Snapdragon products. Qualcomm has essentially tried to wash its hands of any complaints about compatibility with its Snapdragon Control Panel. This features an updated version of Microsoft’s own Prism x86 emulator that should make most non-native games and other software compatible.

But Qualcomm has also told Gizmodo it has not even considered Fex with its upcoming Snapdragon X2 chips. As for which emulator wins out for gaming, we’ll just need to wait and see. In any case, Fex is open source, meaning we could see it running on a variety of platforms in the coming months. It’s all gravy for Valve, since it doesn’t have to lift a finger to see its gaming storefront expand to even more platforms.

Valve’s Proton already did the same for Linux

The Steam Deck’s Proton layer is still one of its greatest innovations, even if most people don’t even know it’s there. © Jorge Jimenez / Gizmodo

As much as most people are obsessed with the idea of a Steam Machine as a kind of PC console, the real innovation behind the system has been around for years. Valve’s secret sauce to Linux gaming, the Proton compatibility layer, first saw the light of day seven years ago. It took Valve until the 2022 Steam Deck to bring Proton into the limelight. After a few updates, Proton has proved so effective that Steam games playing on SteamOS regularly offer better performance than the same title running with the same hardware on Windows (likely due to inefficient background processes). ProtonDB reports there are more than 24,300 games rated as at least playable with Proton.

Proton was constructed thanks to a host of third-party and independent developers bankrolled by Valve. Proton took time, and so did Fex. It will take more time to iron out any kinks users will inevitably find with their initial installations.

Proton is a distribution of Wine (another Windows compatibility layer) that essentially lets a game run the full Windows executable without needing to go through Linux. Fex, as emulation, is different and requires more processing power to execute both the software and the hardware-as-software simulation. Valve promises the performance hit shouldn’t be too bad. Still, how well this works matters more on a device with lower-end specs, like most of today’s phones lacking the latest and greatest CPU. Plus, you probably won’t see SteamOS running on your phone in the near future.

Gaming is getting more expensive. Consoles and PCs both got more expensive in 2025, and 2026 could prove even worse thanks to the ongoing RAM shortage. But gaming as an entertainment medium will still be in demand even if players stop buying games. Xbox’s streaming platform is in a better place because of the pricing crunch. If I really want to meet my games where they live, then playing a version of SteamOS on some lightweight device will probably prove the better option.