Tesla Shifts on Gaming, Incorporating Steam into Vehicles

Tesla is accelerating toward a world where their vehicles are gaming systems on wheels.

On Friday, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company is “making progress toward Steam integration. Demo probably next month.”

• Tesla currently offers a select number of built-in games in the Tesla Arcade feature in its Model S and X cars, including “Cuphead,” “Stardew Valley,” and “Sonic the Hedgehog 1.”
• Adding the Steam platform would potentially open up the gaming options to a huge library of titles. Steam reached 50,000 games on its platform last year.
• Further details on whether Tesla would allow full access to the Steam library and other nuances have not emerged.

In December, Tesla modified the gaming system to be disabled while its cars are in motion, following intervention from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Game Changer

The auto manufacturer and clean energy company has a team of software engineers in Seattle focused on gaming  and is building a similar group in Austin. The company has been porting over popular titles to Tesla Arcade. 

Tesla said last year it would bring “The Witcher” and “Cyberpunk 2077” onto the platform, but both titles have been delayed. 

Musk acknowledged some technical challenges related to that project in December: “Lot of internal debate as to whether we should be putting effort towards generalized gaming emulation vs. making individual games work well.”