Valve’s virtual reality plans hit actual reality

The Steam Frame headset is here, and it may not surprise you: it was supposed to cost less than $1,059. “We set out to come out with a device that would have been far more affordable, but the global RAM market, the global storage market have impacted us the same way they’ve impacted everybody,” Valve developer Jeremy Selan told the BBC. “We fought hard to get it even to this price.”

I haven’t yet seen Valve say whether it’s selling the Steam Frame at cost, like the company confirmed it was doing with the $1,049 Steam Machine living room PC. But Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais hinted maybe so in an interview with Tom’s Hardware: “there’s not really any sort of the kind of distortion compared to just the price of the parts in there.”

When IGN asked Griffais why Valve didn’t simply ship the Steam Frame with less RAM, he answered: “I think at this point, things were a little bit too far in development to fully rethink the product.”

When it first announced the Steam Frame, Valve said it was targeting a lower price than its previous Valve Index headset, which cost $999 at launch and required a direct plug into a PC. The Steam Frame is wireless, can stream from a PC over Wi-Fi or its included 6GHz USB wireless dongle, and it can also play not-so-demanding games on its own Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and 16GB of RAM. Valve said that amount of RAM helped it get Half-Life: Alyx running natively on the headset.

While the price might be high, Valve says it’s “pretty comfortable” with it because other computing gear is getting more expensive at the same time.

“[I]f you look at the memory and anything that has a similar amount of memory, it’s kind of trending the same direction and Steam Machine is not really getting more expensive than a comparable PC,” Griffais told IGN. “They’re kind of evolving at the same spot in the same market, and I think the same will apply to the Frame as well.”