Bit by Bit is a weekly column focusing on technical advances each and every week across multiple spaces. My name is Adam Conway, and I've been covering tech and following the cutting-edge for a decade. If there's something you're interested in and would like to see covered, you can reach out to me at adam@xda-developers.com.

What's the biggest pitfall of x86-based gaming handhelds right now? In my opinion, it's almost certainly battery life. While the Steam Deck manages to eke out impressive battery life thanks to a combination of its incredibly efficient CPU and its software, you're still looking at a bit over an hour of battery life on an OLED model while playing the likes of Cyberpunk: 2077. What if poor battery life was something that could be overcome?

Valve has been working on a version of Proton that seems to be aimed at enabling games to run on Arm-based machines. While not evidence of an Arm-based Steam Deck, "Proton-arm64ec-5" was spotted by Tom's Hardware a while ago on SteamDB. SteamDB tracks changes to games and apps on Steam, and can sometimes be a source of information leakage for Valve's first-party titles. In fact, it was one of the first signs of an impending Counter-Strike 2 release.

If a Proton build for Arm were to come, it could potentially unlock a lot of potential for Arm-based gaming handhelds running Linux, especially if it's just as good as what Valve has managed to achieve with Proton on Linux already.

Valve wouldn't be the first

Though it might be the most open

Valve's Proton for Arm wouldn't be the first translation layer capable of playing x86-based games on Arm, and far from it, too. In fact, Apple was one of the first to really hit the mainstream with its Game Porting Toolkit, an impressive piece of engineering that manages to translate calls meant for DirectX to Metal, and instructions from x86 to Arm. That's essentially what Proton would do too, but even then, Apple wasn't the first either.

One project that has been doing this for a few years has been Hangover, a play on Wine that's capable of running basic x86 applications on arm64 architectures. It can be incredibly more performant compared to just using Wine, and it can integrate with tools like Box64 in order to execute x86-based applications on Arm. If Box64 sounds familiar, it's probably because it was at the core of a project that saw The Witcher 3 run on a 64-core RISC-V machine recently, alongside other titles like Stray.

However, Valve's work on making Proton mainstream has opened eyes to what's possible on Linux, and it's likely that the company could recreate the same success with an Arm-based Steam Deck. The battery life benefits of an Arm-based Steam Deck could see significant gains over x86 options, especially given that battery life is one of the biggest drawbacks of gaming handhelds at the moment.

However, the exciting part isn't just the options for gamers that will be unlocked by having a translation layer that translates from x86 to Arm. No, it'll be even more exciting because it may mean companies are more likely to build games for an Arm architecture, which in turn benefits the entire ecosystem. It wouldn't just be Apple and Qualcomm doing Arm-based PCs, it would be Valve too, with a gaming handheld successor that's already proven to have worked in the past.

I really want an Arm-based Steam Deck

I love my Steam Deck

I love the Steam Deck, but it still has some downsides. It's not the most powerful, it has some imperfections when it comes to performance, and the battery life can be middling at times if you're playing a more intensive game. However, what it lacks is more than made up for by its incredible form factor and software, where most games you wouldn't even be able to tell were made for Windows and not Linux. To an end-user, it just works, and that's all that matters.

I think that if any company has the chop to pull off an Arm-based gaming handheld, it's definitely Valve. They've shown to be committed to hardware in recent years, and the hardware that it's been putting out has been phenomenal. The multiple Steam Decks, the Valve Index, all of it shows that the company is trying its best to make good hardware, and an Arm-based Steam Deck would almost certainly be no different.

If an Arm-based Steam Deck launched in the near future, I would definitely buy it. It's clear Valve is cooking up something but what that will end up being is anyone's guess.