As if Valve needed to spread the influence of Steam even further, the company has formally announced that SteamOS will now be officially supported on more devices. This news comes at the same time as the announcement of Lenovo’s upcoming Legion Go S—a budget-friendly PC handheld launching later this year.
The new handheld will initially release with SteamOS on-board, with a more expensive Windows-laden configuration coming later.
Steaming forward
The announcement of the Legion Go S is one of the many bits and bobs coming out of CES 2025. Valve and Lenovo have worked together to make the new system fully compatible with SteamOS. Consequently, it’s officially been dubbed by Valve as “the first officially licensed third-party handheld powered by SteamOS.”
While this might be the first, it will certainly not be the last. In the same announcement, Valve has also confirmed that it is working on improving compatibility across even more handhelds.
“Ahead of the Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of Steam OS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves.”
As Steam Deck owners already know, SteamOS is designed to be a tailor-made, almost console-like experience for PC handheld users.
One of its party tricks is that, in addition to giving users complete access to all compatible games on Steam, users can also boot into ‘Desktop Mode’ and then install other game launchers and software that’s not on Steam. Of course, hardware compatibility can be temperamental under these conditions, but developers have been getting better at optimizing for devices like the Legion Go S and Steam Deck.
On the go
The aforementioned newly-announced Lenovo Legion Go S will sport an AMD Radeon GPU that’s built on AMD RDNA 2 architecture. It’ll have support for upscaling technology FSSR and Fidelity FX.
It features an 8″ 1920 x 1200 resolution screen with a 120Hz variable refresh rate. Its charging speed goes up to 65W, and features a form of fast charging that’s been coined as Rapid Charge Pro. It will ship with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, with the option to expand that further by means of a microSD card.
As more handhelds embrace SteamOS, it should make this burgeoning market even easier for the mainstream to get into. Valve seems poised to simplify the experience for both developers and consumers as much as possible, arguably a win for everyone. But, of course, this also further expands its pseudo-monopoly of the PC market. “You win some, you lose some” as they say.
