
Playtron: the startup hoping to Steam Deck-ify the world
What if Steam Deck, but not just Steam and not just Deck?

The former CEO of Cyanogen has a plan for a platform-agnostic gaming operating system.
Handhelds are the future of gaming — but there are reasons the category hasn’t exploded yet. The Nintendo Switch is locked down, Windows can be cumbersome, and Valve’s pick-up-and-play SteamOS hasn’t yet escaped the Steam Deck.
What if there were an Android of gaming, an OS you could install on any capable hardware to get a controller-friendly PC experience? Imagine an “Epic Deck” that could actually play Fortnite, a “5G Deck” for cellular carriers, or maybe a “PlayStation Deck” for Sony’s growing PC ambitions.
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They’ve already seen The Witcher 3 running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 smartphone — admittedly at under 30fps with somewhat potato-y graphics.
But while Qualcomm has been talking a big game about its Snapdragon X Elite chips coming this summer, both McMaster and Qualcomm exec Micah Knapp suggest it might take a couple more years for Arm to match x86 for gaming. “Have I seen faster? Yes. Have I seen better battery life? Yes. Not one example I can point to with both,” says Knapp.
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A lot of things would have to go right for Playtron to succeed, and it probably won’t be the only company shipping a handheld OS. Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais now tells me the company’s finally working directly with other companies to bring SteamOS to its handhelds, and I’m currently testing a promising SteamOS clone called Bazzite. Microsoft also won’t sit on its hands forever.
But for the moment, Playtron sounds intriguing — particularly for anyone who wants to challenge the status quo of Steam PC gaming.
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This would be probably what MS should do if they still want to become something in the PC space, but time is running and nothing changed over the years for MS in the PC space.
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