Playing Steam games natively on Android with GameHub: A hands-on…well…painful report.

After roughly four hours of testing, I was thoroughly disillusioned. If I have to constantly tweak parameters just to get a title to run, maybe with a bit of luck, that has nothing to do with user-friendliness. It’s only suitable for people who enjoy tinkering until they finally achieve a small victory. That’s why I compared it to Dark Souls: you need patience, persistence, and a willingness to probe every weak point before you succeed.

For everyone else, I can only recommend sticking to a PC, Mac, Linux machine, Windows/Linux handheld, or a Steam Deck. The frustration involved here is simply not worth it. Those platforms offer a completely different experience, far removed from this kind of time-sink.

Still, GameHub at least shows that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. At some point, Android devices might actually become comfortable for playing Steam games natively and could even turn into real competitors for the Steam Deck and Windows handhelds. As things stand today, my conclusion is simple: avoid it, especially if your tolerance for frustration isn’t very high.

GameHub was available online as a free download at the time of testing.

Anyone who has recently seen videos in their YouTube feed claiming that “Steam games can now be played natively on Android” (as I did) probably had their eyes light up. Playing Steam games with cloud saves on Android devices sounds like the next logical step after SteamOS. These videos always refer to version 5.0+ of GameHub. So I immediately grabbed two different Android devices and gave it a try.

One important note: GameHub can also stream PC and PlayStation games, but I didn’t test those features. This is strictly about native playability.

In GameHub, you can not only browse a large selection of pre-curated titles, but also view their recommended system specifications. After selecting a game, you can sign in to Steam to download and play it. If you want to find a specific title, tap the question-mark icon, enter the game’s name, then sign in to your Steam account (for security, I recommend using two-factor authentication) and tap "Get Game". The system will warn you not to leave the app, as doing so may cause the download to fail.

Even though I followed this advice and used a stable Wi-Fi connection, I still encountered two network errors, both of which forced the download to restart from zero. And if you download two games back-to-back, do it one at a time. Starting a second download stops the first, and without a resume function, you’re stuck starting over again.

Fortunately, the title I chose, Last Time I Saw You, was under 1 GB, so surviving three restarts was at least manageable.

After the download completes, four options appear: Play Now, and under the three-dot menu, PC Game Settings, Add to Home Screen, and Uninstall Game. The menu works with both touch and a controller; I first tested it with the Ayn Odin. Inside PC Game Settings, under Compatibility and Translation Params, there are multiple default profiles for each game, such as Extreme. If a game doesn’t launch immediately, switching this to "Stable" or "Compatible" can sometimes help.

When tapping "Play Now", you must enable Bluetooth and allow location access, otherwise the required firmware and driver download won’t start. A nice touch: while the drivers are downloading, the game’s trailer plays in the background. After the game launches, the controller detected by GameHub appears in the top-right corner. Unfortunately, GameHub then hangs during startup. Switching to "Steam Light Weight Mode" didn’t help, and neither did changing from proton10.0-arm64x2 to proton9.0-arm64x3. The same issue occurred with Amnesia: The Dark Descent, The Stanley Parable, Outlast, and Raft. No game would launch, despite the different parameters I tested.

So I switched hardware and tried a tablet with the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, 8 GB RAM, plus 8 GB of virtual RAM. Most titles still refused to run, but I noticed that a few games in my Steam library had a green check mark, as if GameHub was hinting “try these instead.” Alongside Crysis 2, the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot had this green check. I installed it and gave it a shot. I made it to the setup menu, but it wouldn’t go further, even after changing various parameters.

Fine, one last chance. Two more titles were marked with green checks: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (too large to download just for testing) and Outlast. I installed Outlast. And yes: it finally worked. The game runs acceptably at 1280×720 and around 30 FPS, with only a few graphical glitches. So there are some bright spots after all.

Many users on various forums are currently pointing out how difficult it is to run a natively installed Steam game on an Android device through GameHub. Unfortunately, I’ve seen the same thing. Depending on the device, a few exceptions seem to exist, such as Hollow Knight: Silksong, Sea of Stars, Broforce, Metro 2033 Redux, and Thief 3, according to Reddit users.

I enjoy experimenting with hardware and software, but after roughly four hours, my patience ran out. There are already plenty of established ways to play Steam games on all kinds of devices, so forcing a game to run at all costs feels unnecessary.

Out of more than 600 games in my Steam library, only about ten were marked with a green check as “runnable,” and even those often failed to launch. Outlast was the only exception for me, but it looked noticeably blurry and washed out at 720p on an Android tablet (11.2-inch display, 3,200 × 2,136 pixels). I wouldn’t want to play it in that state.