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Steam Frame price revealed, waiting open until 17th September

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After an accidental leaking of their review video from Linus Tech Tips last week, we somewhat knew that news on Steam's latest VR venture was imminent. Today the product page has been updated, with a few new details revealed for the first time. The headset is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and runs an ARM64 version of SteamOS. Through this you'll be able to natively run some of your Steam games directly on the headset itself. It should be noted however that the Steam Frame is listed as a "streaming-first" device, introducing some genuinely interesting tech to make wireless VR streaming feasible. There will be "Steam Frame Verified" markers coming to the storefront to give you an idea of what will run well when untethered though.

But let's get to the important part: the price. The Steam Frame is available in two flavours, with the cheaper model featuring 256GB of UFS storage, and its more expensive counterpart bumping that up to 1TB. Both models do feature a Micro SD card slot for expansion however. You can find the pricing below:
  • 256GB Kit - £889 / $1059
  • 1TB Kit - £1089 / $1299
Both variants do come with Half-Life: Alyx included, though there's no indication that the game will run natively on the platform.

Those interested in picking one up for themselves can now sign up for the wait list, much in the same manner as the Steam Machine. This list will remain open until 6pm on the 17th of September here in the UK, with all submissions then randomised. Within a day of the list closing, you can expect an email saying how long you're likely to be waiting for your unit.

:arrow: Source
 
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Had they launched that thing closer to its announcement for $999 at the very most, I would have bought it in an instant, but in the meantime I got very comfortable with a Laptop + XREAL glasses combo for non-VR games with a Quest 3 for the occasional Beat Saber fix... So yeah, not much reason to buy a Frame in this economy.
 
Expected 1500 for the cheapest model tbh. Sadly it is too expensive for most folk. At least no spyware like on Quest. However, more interesting part is Valve's investment into FEX and ARM (or RISC in general, I suppose) based hardware.
 
The failure of vr this generation can be summed up in so many ways. But one factor has to be how many companies are involved making such gear, the gigantic gulf in what the "great experience" is versus what is priced affordable, and how none of the manufacturers at all seem interested in bringing that expanse any closer, or improving the baseline in any way whatsoever.
 
Signed up for the pre-order.

It seems expensive compared to the Quest 3, but you subsidize the price of that with your soul. When compared to the Index or Vive Cosmos along with a wireless setup (or even portable PCs and flagship phones at Trumpflated prices), this is actually not that bad.

Plus the Vive Cosmos + Wireless is so cluncky to set up and use (light houses, separate controllers, pcie wifi card with 15 ft range and 3 foot wire for the antenna, 3 separate software overlays, etc), that I pretty much never use it. I'm hoping this is just plug and play like the Steam Deck is.
 
BlusterBong said:
oh look, another overpriced valve thing that partially can be blamed on market conditions and largely can be blamed on GabeN and co's seemingly incompetent abilities to cut any deals with the companies making the components whatseoever
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If the oligopoly tells you to take the deal or go away, I don't think there's room for negotiation...
 
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Willgheminass said:
Atleast it won't have built in surveillance software built into the OS like Zucks headsets. Everyone was expecting it to be a grand+ anyways.
What I'm really excited for is the increased support for emulating x86 games for Android and ARM based platforms from Valve after this gets released, especially for stuff like the AYN Thor
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When mark zuckerberg taps into my vr headset and realizes that I like playing beat saber and jerking off 😱

I agree the ARM stuff is awesome
 
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Signed up for the 1TB waitlist, I am 100% planning to order one when I get the email. It's priced pretty much exactly where I was expecting it would be, and like... yeah, it's expensive, but so is everything else already (ESPECIALLY anything computer related). And if it can get me off the couch for a few hours a week to play beat saber, if nothing else, it'll be worth the cost to me, and I already have a good number of other VR titles in my steam library as it is.

Right now I've got an ancient Lenovo Explorer, and the fact that I have to hook it up to my computer half way across my apartment, with a mess of extension cables and USB hubs just to make it reach my living room, is the biggest thing keeping me away from VR gaming right now. Not to mention I'm not even sure how WMR headsets work on Linux systems, if at all, and the controller tracking loss I'd periodically experience with it anyway when I was using it on Windows.
 
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For this price VR can rot for all I care. There's maybe a dozen games worth checking out in total, most of the stuff out there is disposable game-adjacent "experiences" scattered on several mutually exclusive platforms...

And here I am wanting to get excited for VR. A decade and a half in there's still basically nothing except for getting harvested for data.
 
I think a huge issue with VR is seggregation of content. Some Oculus exclusive means other self contains VR or PCVR are missing out.VR is too niche to survive not being open so it can take off some more.
Have ppl pick whatever hardware they want and make more great games available for every hardware.
We don't need more shovelware games either lol
 
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The killer app for VR is users modding VR support into old games, and the biggest player in VR somehow both spends billions on and also does seemingly nothing with VR.

I truly don't get it. It's plain VR needs to get opened up to grow, but the need for those quarterly figures to look good overrides any kind of sane outlook on the future of the medium. Surely, even Meta understands that a bigger VR market directly translates into more data harvested?
 
I'm not entering the queue. Still getting my finances up from the machine, and got a large vacation planned.
The price... For me it's expensive. The 256 gb version doesn't have enough memory, the 1tb sounds like overkill and is too pricy for my taste. But more important: it's not powerful by itself for large or even flat games (though yes: arm chip conversion is AWESOME), and streaming for the steam machine'is being worked on', and currently needs a windows pc. So it's nice you get HL:Alyx with it, but i can't properly play it yet.

There's also the social aspect of vr. The machine sees some regular couch coop play with daughter and even wife. VR is a solitary activity. Not it's fault, but a reason for me to pass.
 
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if i had a job id rather get the frame than the meta quest 3/s but i understand why people do get them. its just a shame you can run an equivalent of linage or degoogle them...
beat saber is the only VR game im ngl
superhot as well too not much else to the platform
 
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such said:
For this price VR can rot for all I care. There's maybe a dozen games worth checking out in total, most of the stuff out there is disposable game-adjacent "experiences" scattered on several mutually exclusive platforms...

And here I am wanting to get excited for VR. A decade and a half in there's still basically nothing except for getting harvested for data.
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Can't argue with this. There seems to be a few great experiences out there but.... I'll pass for this price.
 
Not unreasonable, considering the Valve Index was $999, and that's just a PCVR headset, with no built in processing or tracking.
The controller tech doesn't appear to be quite as advanced as the Knuckles but the Knuckles are also fragile and unreliable. You can get individual finger tracking using gloves anyway that works way better than the Knuckles finger tracking.

RedoLane said:
Hold on. did i read it right?

ARM64 on SteamOS?

Is this... a sign they're moving to ARM-based processors for the next Steam Deck revision/successor?

That's huge, honestly.
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I am doubtful based on the performance of FEX if Steam Deck will ever fully move to ARM.
Sure, you can run a lot of less demanding games at playable framerates but the best you can expect in most cases is 720p at 30-40 FPS and anything actually demanding is unplayable.
ARM hardware will get better and able to emulate games it previously couldn't, but the facts remain the same; ARM will always struggle with modern PC games and a native x86/64 device will always run native x86/64 games better.

They could make a cheaper and smaller entry level Steam Deck based on ARM though since ARM is more efficient. Think like 200-300 bucks. But it would have a hard time competing with Switch Lite 2 when that comes out because the overhead of x86 emulation would just mean it wouldn't be able to achieve anywhere near the same level of graphics fidelity, performance, battery life or compatibility vs native ARM games.
And SteamOS isn't a great platform for ARM devices because unlike Android it has few or no native ARM releases currently (maybe that will change in the future, Valve are probably hoping it will) but I suppose this is why Lepton exists. It remains to be seen how the performance is with Lepton and whether it will support all Android games, but it surely will be a good option for some of them.
 
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