Valve has taken its sweet time, but the final piece of its new ecosystem is finally here. After the Steam Controller in May and the Steam Machine in June, it's the Steam Frame's turn to join the party. It's a standalone VR headset, now available to pre-order, with sales kicking off on 18 September — just a few days away. And as you'd expect given its ambitions, Valve hasn't exactly gone hunting for a bargain price tag. Quite the opposite.
The Steam Frame starts at £1,049 for the 256GB version, while the 1TB model climbs to £1,279 (ouch!). Prices that drop the headset straight into very premium territory and that risk putting off a fair chunk of players curious about virtual reality. Are there any left, by the way?
A VR headset, but not only that
If the Steam Frame's hefty spec sheet is anything to go by, the headset wasn't designed as a straightforward rival to the Meta Quest and friends. What Valve actually wants is a machine that bridges virtual reality and the vast Steam library. The headset runs standalone thanks to SteamOS and can therefore launch games without being tethered to a PC, while retaining the option to stream more demanding titles from a sufficiently powerful machine. Under the bonnet, Valve has gone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, paired with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Storage comes in 256GB or 1TB flavours, with the option to expand via microSD card. On the display side, the Steam Frame packs two 2,160 x 2,160-pixel LCD screens per eye, matched with pancake lenses (that's what they call them, don't blame me). The refresh rate goes up to 120Hz under normal conditions, with a 144Hz mode still billed as experimental.
All of this sits inside a headset Valve wants to be relatively light and comfortable, with a central module weighing just 185 grams and a total of roughly 440 grams once the whole thing is kitted out with its battery and head strap. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth round out the spec sheet, while motion tracking relies on the headset's built-in cameras and gives the controllers 6 degrees of freedom tracking.
Standalone Half-Life: Alyx as a welcome gift
Valve did still have one card left to play to justify this very high-end positioning: Half-Life: Alyx. Every buyer who doesn't already own the game will receive a copy with their Steam Frame. And not just any version, since Valve has developed a genuine standalone edition of the game, able to run directly on the headset without needing a PC to supply the grunt. That's no trivial bit of engineering, as Half-Life: Alyx, originally built to run on PC, had to be ported from x86 architecture to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's ARM architecture. It's also a way for Valve to show off what its headset can do. Released in 2020, Half-Life: Alyx remains to this day one of the absolute benchmarks of virtual reality, and its arrival directly on the Steam Frame gives you a sense of Valve's ambitions for the device.
The company has also used the time since the headset's announcement to beef up its compatibility programme. More than 130 extra games have joined the list of "Steam Frame Verified" titles, working on the same principle as games certified for Steam Deck or Steam Machine.
A price that's frankly frightening
The problem, obviously, remains the price. At £1,049 minimum, the Steam Frame costs more than double a Steam Deck LCD and lands a very long way from the prices charged by mainstream VR headsets. Valve clearly isn't trying to push virtual reality into the mainstream by slashing prices. And the bill can climb higher still, in practice. The headset ships with a charger, but Valve is also selling an official 45W charger for £39, a replacement comfort kit for £59 and an ergonomic accessory kit for £69. The latter adds lanyards for the controllers, a top strap for the headset and a wider light blocker. Valve is therefore embracing a positioning very different from that of something like the Meta Quest, and this Steam Frame comes across more as a standalone, versatile Steam machine, able to move from traditional gaming to virtual reality and switch over to PC streaming when its own capabilities fall short.
The question now is whether this particularly ambitious pitch will win over anyone beyond the most tech-obsessed players. In a market this competitive and, let's be honest, a touch niche, everything is still to prove. "Bonne chance", Valve.
