I know not every game has a mobile port, and this the way it works for some other media too buying a physical copy of a book doesn’t entitle you to an ebook version and vice versa. On the other hand, a steam game can be played on Windows, MacOS, or Linux without restriction provided it’s ported or works with Proton.
In any event it still rubs me the wrong way to know I bought Slay the Spire on Steam, and Steam has a mobile presence, and StS has a mobile port, but that still doesn’t end with me playing StS on mobile without buying it again.
Hopefully the recent court stuff with Epic and Apple will mean Valve could start putting up their own mobile launcher on iOS, as I imagine they wouldn’t see just Android as worth the effort.
you can stream your pc games to mobile using steam streaming, parsec or sunshine. it works over the internet with playable latency.
you need a controller and good internet for it to work well, but ive been doing it and its great.
I don’t wanna use data for that though, and if I’ve got wifi I’m probably in a place I can just use my laptop just as easily
No, porting to something that only has touch controls is bad. Touch controls should be only be implemented alongside traditional controls
Slay the Spire probably doesn’t need any adjustment on that front
^
there are a lot of add-on physical controllers for phones these days that basically turn them into a steam deck
Depends on the game. Anything where pointing and clicking is the main way of interacting with the game it works just fine.
I’ve played the iPad version of FTL way more than the pc version. Lately I’ve been playing Loop Hero, which works fantastic (icons are a bit small but whatever).
Nah you got a point. Would be cool I think (coming from someone who barley plays on his phone)
I think you can sorta do this with Steam remote play streaming to your phone? But in order to do that you basically need to be on the same LAN as your computer so what’s the point.
The Windows/Linux thing is different though because a PC regardless of OS will generally be using an x86 or x86-64 processor, while mobile devices (and some apple computers now, I think?) use ARM. Proton/WINE is just a translation layer, but running x86 code on ARM requires full on emulation, I believe, which has some intense performance costs especially when you’ve got fancy graphics rendering stuff to worry about.
As to why the few Steam games with mobile versions don’t have those included with Steam? Probably Google/Apple and their app store monopolies getting in the way.
Not necessarily true, it’s easy to use the tailscale mobile app to create a direct VPN connection to your computer from anywhere, then use sunshine/moonlight for game streaming. However I’ve never actually tested what the streaming experience is like over cellular data using this method.
Do you even need to do all that? I think Steam remote play works over the internet already, it’s just latency and bandwidth is usually unplayably bad anywhere but a LAN.
Maybe steam remote play implements STUN to give you a direct connection to your computer, idk. Sunshine & Moonlight are much better than steam remote play in my experience on LAN though, and are both open source.
The point I’m making is more “if they already have a mobile port, I should be able to play it via steam with the same license”. Like imagine if you had to buy a new version of a PC game because yours just doesn’t work on Linux, even though a Linux port already exists
steam game can be played on Windows, MacOS, or Linux without restriction provided it’s ported or works with Proton.
Usually you would be playing a windows x86 build via Proton on an x86 (or emulated x86) system, but AFAIK Proton doesn’t have a backend for iOS/Android (which are ARM), and steam won’t even run on an ARM linux ubuntu. Devs most likely would refuse this because converting a game to Android/iOS is a whole new build, they might not have been using an engine like Unity/Godot that simplifies adding Android/iOS as build targets, they might not be willing to redesign UI elements for a platform that’s touchscreen-first, they might not want to hire additional QA/play testers for mobile devices, and if they are willing to do all of that, they might not be willing to give it for free for users who bought the x86 windows build, they might even want to make the game’s revenue model ad-driven or pay-to-win.
But you can ignore all that and buy a steam-deck like device, or download the “Steam Link” app and stream a game from Steam to your mobile device.
I’m not asking for everything to be ported to mobile, just that if there is a mobile version already made that I can play it through steam since I already own that game
i wish phones and handheld games were completely separate again tbh. even these annoyingly large-screened phones they made annoyingly large-screened for Gamers
are imo too small to really get into, just let phones be compact dedicated communication devices and if you really want to game on the go get a tablet or steam deck or whatever 
but anyway can’t you just pirate the mobile StS?
You can pretty easily pirate most popular Android games. The site with the most games/apps and no sketchy adware stuff is 4pda, a russian language web forum.
Yea but I wanna have cloud saves and all that jizz
I think the likelihood of this happening is continually increasing as ARM-based and similar RISC processors become more and more powerful and x86 emulation continues to improve. There’s a very real chance we’ll see ARM-based steam deck competitors in the next couple of years, and at that point it’s basically just an inevitability.
There is Steam Deck, but I can’t connect ir to my phone data via hotspot so…maybe in the future.
I play classic doom once in a while on freedom. Although its very limited. I used to play a lot on retroarch. Again that has limits too when it comes to doom.
Razer Kishi and Steam Link app? I used to do this all the time before my Steam Deck.
