Tesla launches Steam in its cars with thousands of games

Tesla has launched Steam integration inside its Model S and Model X electric cars with thousands of games now playable.

Over the last few years, Tesla has been investing heavily into integrating video games into its in-car entertainment system, but it still surprised many when Tesla said earlier this year that it planned to go as far as integrating Valve’s Steam, an online video game store and distribution platform, in its vehicles.

Steam offers a massive library of video games, and integrating it into Tesla’s EVs would result in a massive increase in games playable inside Tesla vehicles.

In July, CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla should release a demo of the Steam integration by August. It didn’t come, but Musk reiterated the plan to integrate the video game library in Tesla vehicles.

Today, Tesla launched Steam Beta for Model S and Model X as part of its “holiday update”:

We reported all the details of Tesla’s holiday update earlier today for most Tesla vehicles, but the Steam integration is only for the refreshed Model S and Model X produced over the last two years.

That’s because Tesla’s two flagship vehicles are equipped with a more powerful entertainment computer designed for video games.

With the unveiling of the new Model S and Model X, Tesla announced the new gaming computer:

Up to 10 teraflops of processing power enables in-car gaming on-par with today’s newest consoles via Tesla Arcade. Wireless controller compatibility allows gaming from any seat.

A known chip leaker, Patrick Schur, posted a diagram of Tesla’s new gaming computer powered by the AMD Navi 23 GPU:

The system is integrated and connects directly to two touchscreens inside the Model S and Model X to play games, watch entertainment, and perform other functions.

Musk also revealed that the new computer has more storage space to be able to handle more games on the platform at the same time, which is going to be useful to handle your Steam library.

The website videocardz compared the specs with existing consoles from the latest generation – showing that it does indeed match up well based on the specs available:

As we previously reported, Tesla has a team of software engineers working on video games in Seattle, and it more recently started building a similar team in Austin. 

The automaker believes that with the advent of self-driving, entertainment – including video games – will become more important inside vehicles.