Would it not make sense for the Valve Steambox to run on ARM since they're cooperating with Nvidia (and just launched Steam for Linux?) I thought the Nvidia Tegra 3 was considered quite the powerful chip.

Porting games becomes much more difficult when thing's are running on a different architecture.

Is that an issue for modern games / engines? I would think most people who drop down to assembly also have a C level fallback - and people have been porting games to x64 from x86 already?

> Is that an issue for modern games / engines? I would think most people who drop down to assembly also have a C level fallback - and people have been porting games to x64 from x86 already?

Language doesn't matter so much as the API - you can write against DirectX for both the Xbox 360 and the PC, making appropriate changes. "Porting" to/from the [for example] PS3 is a much bigger ordeal.

Right, so since they're already running Steam and several high profile games on Linux, going for ARM should be aaaaalmost as easy as a recompile?

The ARM/Linux world is somewhat fragmented right now. There's vanilla ARM/Linux/glibc which has no drivers (vanilla Linux cannot use Android drivers). There's Android, which has drivers but has completely different APIs than desktop Linux. Then there's franken-Linux which tries to shim desktopish APIs on top of Android drivers. Which one should Steam target?

It's not like people are installing Linux on Android tablets all over the place and Valve needs to support those users. Valve doesn't need to worry about those devices. They only need to worry about the ones coming out with that Nvidia chip, for which Nvidia will definitely provide the drivers. So what you talked about is completely a non-issue here.

Then there's a question about how many months or years it would take Nvidia to definitely write those drivers. But yeah, if Valve wanted to lead the development of a new ecosystem at any cost I guess they could do it.