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You don’t actually need a VR headset to play VRChat, but it has long been one of the most popular VR titles, consisting of millions of custom avatars and (at least) thousands of user-generated worlds. With the Steam Frame soon on the way – now officially coming this summer – the VRChat devs have uploaded another version for playing on the headset standalone.

The game is already available on Steam as a Windows x86 build, and there’s no doubt that the Frame will work well with the VR title, thanks to Valve’s use of compatibility layers such as Proton and FEX. The latter is used for running Windows games on ARM-based devices like the Steam Frame. Either way, VRChat’s Android version is now on Steam for even more support.

VRChat’s Android version has been uploaded to Steam

As spotted in a recent update in VRChat’s app history on SteamDB, the developers of VRChat have uploaded an Android Package Kit (.apk) to the Steam version of the game, along with support for OpenXR. To put it simply, the game will be well supported on the Steam Frame in standalone mode, without requiring you to connect to another gaming machine.

VRChat is already available on the Google Play Store for Android devices – Meta Quests run on a modified version of Android, if you didn’t know – so this is a build of the game that is already ready to go.

Since the Steam Frame can load .apk files, it makes sense for this update to be specifically targeting Valve’s new VR headset. Android performance should be smoother than Windows due to the OS being more optimized for the ARM architecture.

Source: SteamDB

In the same vein that Proton runs Windows games on Linux, and FEX runs Windows games on ARM devices, Valve has a compatibility layer for Android games on Linux, officially known as Lepton. As such, it seems the most efficient way to run these games standalone on the Steam Frame, which is powered by an ARM-based Snapdragon Gen 3 chip, is with an .apk.