Mengapa Tidak Ada Game Baru untuk Steam Frame

When Valve announced the Steam Frame, Machine, and Controller back in November, there was this undercurrent of hope that the company would release some secret new game to complement its new hardware. And, now that the Steam Frame is here, completing this round of Valve hardware, it's clear that there is no new game coming to support it. Instead, Valve is supporting its new VR headset with Half-Life: Alyx, the game that launched with the Valve Index back in 2019.

And with how expensive all of this hardware is, thanks in large part to the ongoing RAM crisis, not having a flagship system-seller makes it hard to imagine that a lot of people are going to rush out to buy it. When I recently sat down with Valve to talk about the Steam Frame, I asked why the headset is launching without a big game to sell it, and was told that the company was focused more on wide compatibility.

That's largely because the Steam Frame is running on a chip that's most often found in smartphones, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Valve software developer Jeff Leinbaugh told me they "really prioritized getting software compatibility in a good state so that there would be a huge number of games, I mean as big as possible, available to play on the device or stream to the device on day one." So, instead of one big launch title, Valve wanted the ARM-based headset to give you "a lot of options of what games to play, whether they're VR games or not VR games."

It's definitely nice that a lot of Steam Games run on ARM, thanks to the dual translation layers of Proton and FEX, but there is a lot of room to grow. There are plenty of 2D games that run well on Valve's headset, but getting system performance ready for standalone VR games is still a work in progress.

To Valve's credit, despite telling us back in November that Half-Life: Alyx would be a lot of work to get running natively on the headset, it did eventually get a 'Steam Frame Verified' certification. Other VR games are more hit or miss, though, and Valve's aware of that.

When I asked Leinbaugh about optimization on the Steam Frame, he told me the work on Alyx is key. "Going through the process of making Alyx run standalone is also helping us figure out the new problem of, 'How do we make sure that VR games running standalone are a good experience?'" Because while getting 2D games like Hades II running natively was a relatively simple optimization process, VR is a bigger struggle.

"For VR, it's kind of a different story because comfort is a bigger factor," Leinbaugh told me. "So as we've gone through the process of making Alyx run better, we're learning about what's important when we look at other VR games to make sure that we can guarantee this is a good experience without setting a bar that's just unreasonably high."

It's clear that Valve is actively working on getting PCVR games that are designed for Windows running on ARM. Just in the two weeks I spent testing the Steam Frame, one of the most popular VR games on the planet, Beat Saber, went from having a big 'unsupported' logo in the UI to having a green checkmark. And now the game runs extremely well, and feels great to play because of how light and balanced the Steam Frame generally is.

So, when Valve says that it was focused on getting compatibility down for the Steam Frame’s launch, it seems like it’s still a work in progress. I’m not sure whether or not having a launch title would have complicated standalone VR optimization further, but it at least sounds like the company is focused on getting that performance down. The Steam Deck certainly had its growing pains when it first came out, and I expect that the Steam Frame will as well.

Luckily, thanks to the 6GHz dongle included in the box, streaming PCVR games from a desktop PC to the Steam Frame is incredible, so that should help paper over the standalone mode’s rough edges for now. And, if all you cared about was standalone VR in the first place, maybe this is your sign to grab a Meta Quest 3 instead.