Nvidia and Valve Are Interested In GeForce Now On Steam Deck

Nvidia has revealed that they and Valve are both interested in making GeForce work better on Valve’s hardware, the Steam Deck.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now product manager Andrew Fear shared this statement in an interview:

“There is not a native app on Steam deck today. Use a Chromium browser to make it work. I would say that both Nvidia and Valve, I think we’re both interested in making [GeForce Now on Steam Deck] better. But we don’t have any announcements on a native app coming to Steam.”

GeForce Now dates as far back as 2015, available to consumers who purchased an Nvidia Shield. Nvidia originally had their own storefront to require players to buy or rent games through them, similar to Google Stadia or Amazon Luna. However, they have now switched to a “bring your own games” model.

Specific games are licensed to work with GeForce Now. If you own one of these games under Steam or Epic Games Store, you just have to log on to your account for those services into GeForce Now, and you will be able to access the game, and the cloud save when applicable.

Valve has been working on their own cloud streaming initiative, called Steam Cloud Play. However, their beta program for Steam Cloud Play has started out by partnering with Nvidia’s GeForce Now.

So, Nvidia and Valve are already working with each other through these same cloud gaming services. However, GeForce Now is not directly available on the Steam Deck yet. It’s well known that GeForce Now is flexible for multiple platforms, as it is available on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, and ChromeOS on Chromebook devices. It has even been made available on WebOS, a Linux based operating system that is now only used on LG smart televisions.

In fact, Android, ChromeOS, and WebOS are all based on Linux, and so is SteamOS, the operating system that runs the Steam Deck. However, Valve has been somewhat lax in updating its own operating system, as the last image they had published is years old and based on Debian, whereas the current version used on Steam Decks has already switched to Arch Linux. The problem is so bad that gamers who want to dabble with the supposedly open source SteamOS on their own computers, need to use HoloISO, a fan-made solution based on SteamOS’ recovery image.

It’s likely that the Steam Deck is more than capable of running GeForce Now, which can be run from a web browser on the device. Nvidia and Valve simply haven’t been able to get their efforts together to make it work yet. While the Steam Deck’s RDNA2 CPU is very capable of running many games that are on GeForce Now on its own, this would extend the device’s value and utility. If Nvidia and Valve put more focus on this project, it can be working sooner rather than later.

Source: PC Gamer