Tesla appears to have pulled back plans to include Steam gaming support in new Model S and Model X vehicles, a feature that has only been included in the company’s flagship vehicles for a year and a half.
Tesla first launched Steam gaming support in the Model S and Model X in December 2022. The streaming video game option was made possible thanks to the new AMD Ryzen chip that was added with the Model S/X refresh in mid-2021. However, despite all Model S/X cars being built since then having the AMD Ryzen chip, Steam gaming was only available in newer builds that featured 16GB of RAM, instead of the 8GB of RAM that was previously included.
The Model Y and Model 3 are now also built with the AMD Ryzen chip, but they also didn’t get Steam support because these vehicles did not have a discrete GPU like the Model S/X.
Even when Tesla launched the Cybertruck late last year, it also came without Steam support due to similar hardware limitations.
Now it appears Tesla is no longer including Steam in any of its vehicles, according to a message received by a customer waiting for delivery of his new Model X. The message, which was shared on Reddit, says “Tesla is updating the gaming computer in your Model X and your vehicle is no longer capable of playing Steam games.” The customer has to accept this change in order to take delivery.
Tesla has of course not commented on the reason for the removal of Steam gaming support. Like other features that have been removed over the years, it could be that the data was showing not a lot of owners were playing Steam games in their car, and so Tesla decided to downgrade the computer to no longer support the feature as it wasn’t worth the added cost.
This appears to be the most likely scenario. The Model S and Model X are not high volume cars for Tesla, having only delivered somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 units in the most recent quarter (Tesla now lumps together Model S/X deliveries with the Cybertruck), compared to nearly 400,000 Model 3/Y.
