Steam Game Mode Has Been Brought To The Nintendo Switch Thanks To Proton 11 ARM

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Yesterday, the next stable update of Proton, Proton 11, went into beta, and I brought over a ton of changes from the Experimental branch. However, there was one other massive release that coincided with the desk, and that is the first release of Proton for ARM. While this may not be impactful for the Steam Deck (yet), it is going to be big for many other handhelds and the upcoming Steam Frame. What’s crazy is that we can start playing around with it now, and someone put SteamOS on the Switch.

Over on Bluesky, user AAGaming, who is also a developer for the Decky Plugin Framework, showed off that they were able to put SteamOS on an original Switch. In the video they posted, it shows that they are using Ubuntu and have injected the ARM64 version of Steam onto the device.

According to AAGaming, the process is quite hard to replicate, and they can’t boot any game yet. After finding the correct manifest, they had to download each zip, extract them over each other, and use a custom launch script they made to make sure it would launch. It’s not the easiest process, but they did say they’re working on a way to package it up and make it easier for others to do themselves.

Regardless of how you look at it, this is a huge step towards SteamOS on ARM devices, and it’s incredible. This ultimately opens up SteamOS to be used on any ARM device and uses the Proton compatibility layer to play PC games. Pretty soon, we could be seeing other Android handhelds, like the AYN Odin 3, running SteamOS, and I can’t wait to see how VR will be on the Steam Frame.

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