Elon Musk, boss of Teslahas announced that the company is making progress in Steam integration in your vehicles. This is not the first time that Tesla vehicles offer official support for video games, but integrating the client of the Valve platform are big words.
Tesla already offers some series video games like the well-known Cuphead and Sonic the Hedgehog 1 through Tesla Arcade, but it seems the automaker wants to offer much more by integrating the Steam client. This move may sound crazy at first, but the truth is that it could make a lot of sense if we take into account certain technological movements that have been around Steam in recent years.
While Windows remains the undisputed king of gaming, Valve has maneuvered a lot in the last decade to give Linux prominence in that sector. After some Steam Machines that were shown to be a failure, the Steam Deck seems to have come together somewhat better, a fact that has opened the door to definitively consolidate Linux as a gaming platform, although not without some tricks.
What does the Steam Deck have to do with Tesla electric vehicles? Apparently, nothing, but if we say that the operating system of Tesla vehicles is based on Linux and that the most recent models of the brand use AMD Ryzen processors with RDNA 2 graphics technology, things are beginning to be clearer as the technological base is similar. In other words, from the point of view of software and architecture, everything is very feasible, especially seeing that Steam for Linux is more than consolidated, so the question focuses above all on the power of Tesla vehicles when it comes to run video games.
We’re making progress with Steam integration. Demo probably next month.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2022
In addition to titles compiled for Linux, Steam makes available Proton, a Wine-based compatibility layer that makes it easy to run Windows video games on Linux and macOS. Said compatibility layer is the main responsible for the improvement of Linux Gaming by allowing many video games compiled for Windows to be run on a foreign system. On the other hand, not in a few cases has it served to keep alive titles whose Linux ports have been abandoned for years.
Tesla’s intentions to integrate the Steam client into its vehicles come from afar, when Elon Musk himself tweeted in February of this year that the company wasworking on the general case of getting Steam games to work on a Tesla vs. specific titles”. That message from the tycoon pointed, most likely, to the intention of running triple A games through Steam instead of praying that they arrive ported specifically for electric vehicles.
And does it make sense to have Steam inside a car? Obviously not for the driver, but it can be an interesting addition for the occupants, especially if they are regular players and the trip is long. Why wait to continue your game of The Witcher 3 when you can continue your game on the go? It is true that the Steam Deck is supposed to be for that, but here we enter the field of individual preferences.
At this point, it may be worth remembering the arrival of Steam on ChromeOS taking advantage of the aforementioned consolidation of the client on Linux and the existence of Proton.
