Valve's new branding guidelines hint at Steam Deck's SteamOS for more devices

While we've known for a while that Valve plan to get SteamOS Linux on devices other than the Steam Deck, we don't know when that will happen, but we've got another hint here that things are moving along.

Since the release of the Steam Deck, Valve have repeatedly said it's in their plans to release SteamOS 3 to the public and for hardware vendors to ship on their devices. The joke about Valve Time is as relevant as ever though, with no specific public roadmap on anything and it's years in the making at this point.

Thanks to SteamDB, who also scrape a lot of things from Valve aside from games, like Steamworks Documentation, we've now seen that Valve have updated their branding guidelines (document), which includes a new bit about SteamOS. These guidelines haven't been updated since 2017.

I can show this to you here, since the Steam Branding Guidelines page is entirely public, as is the link to the main document from that page. Examples for the new SteamOS Branding Guidlines:

It will be seriously interesting to see what is the first device other than the Steam Deck to actually ship with SteamOS. Will it be Valve's long rumoured and repeatedly leaked Deckard VR kit, or another handheld from a third-party vendor?

What will be interesting though and a question that popped into my head: what about compatibility notices for games on SteamOS devices other than the Steam Deck? Will that be left to each hardware vendor? I assume so since Valve will still primarily focus on their own Steam Deck with Deck Verified. This may cause community sites like ProtonDB to become more relevant than ever to filter per-device. Don't forget to check our anti-cheat compatibility list too.

Exciting times for the Linux community that we might see more popular devices out there shipping Linux.