My personal opinion is that the frame is a bit of a Trojan horse for widening the hardware they can run games (via Steam) on. With folks playing more and more indie and lower power requirement games, the rise of retroid pockets and Android gaming in general has taken off, and initiatives like gamehub lite have made it possible to run even Skyrim on these low power handhelds.
On the same token, the amount of performance per watt that Apple has been able to get out of custom arm based silicon is astounding. Valve has said they wouldn’t release another steam deck unless it represented a generational leap. That sort of leap would be something like the intel —> m1 that Apple produced.
What’s most exciting for me, is better steam support on multiple architectures. I think what’s most exciting for Valve, is their software and storefront running on more devices and providing a better experience than ever before. From VR to the deck to the desktop to the living room, I think their strategy at this point is pretty clear.
I’ve been wondering this too since the announcement of the frame. The ARM compatibility layer was the most exciting bit of the presentation for me. As much as I love my Deck I most certainly won’t be getting a Deck 2 in the future because what I need more in order to truly enjoy handheld gaming, for these aging eyes of mine, is a larger screen, something like 11+ inches. And it’s clear to me that those sizes can’t be achieved in the form factor of a Deck, you need something like a thick tablet with detachable controllers to do so.
I think the huge success of the Deck is because the form factor and the ability to play AAA PC games in said form factor, even if is on low settings or 30FPS. From the research I’ve done while buying a tablet for both content consumption and gaming is clear to me that ARM is still not up to that task yet but it is close enough. Next year’s Snapdragon elite 2 is tipped to be 30-404% faster and with a good compatibility layer and better drivers it could be a very viable option for handheld gaming.
I think that is not a matter of choice between x86 or ARM. Valve partnership with AMD goes deep and I think they will continue using both platforms for the foreseeable future and even possible but unlikely that at some point we got a base Deck with ARM and a pro model with x86.