Valve hasn’t announced the price or release date of Steam Frame, its first standalone VR headset, although the company is reportedly getting ready with a promo that could bundle in its award-winning VR game Half-Life: Alyx (2020) for free.
The News
As first spotted by VR analyst and Valve watcher Brad Lynch, Valve appears to be actively working on the backend of Steam Frame’s store page, which now includes evidence the company may be giving away a copy of Half-Life Alyx to anyone who purchases a unit.
Lynch showed off a number of strings containing the following snippets: ‘AccountHardwarePromotions’, ‘HLAlyxPromoButtons’, and ‘Frame Alyx Promo’ among others, suggesting the $60 game will be bundled with Steam Frame as a part of a special promotion.
Notably, Valve also gave away Half-Life: Alyx to those who purchased its PC VR headset Valve Index, which launched nearly a year before the game was released. That deal is still good even today, provided the headset isn’t out of stock.
Now, six years since release, Half-Life: Alyx is still largely considered the benchmark for ‘AAA’ VR gaming, garnering a rare [10/10] review from Road to VR in addition to winning PC VR Game of the Year in 2020 among many other industry accolades.
It’s also spawned a number of mods, including arguably the most comprehensive to date: Gunman Contracts. Notably, the original creator of the free Gunman Contracts mod ANB_Seth went on to create the full-fledged VR game called Gunman Contracts – Stand Alone, slated to release on September 10th.
My Take
Valve said late last year it wasn’t developing any new first-party content for Steam Frame, which is a real shame. Steam Frame is probably going to be pretty expensive though, largely in part thanks to the storage/RAM/SoC crisis, making a software giveaway likely the only thing Valve can do to lessen the blow.
It raises the question though: is Valve really just giving away a PC VR game to Steam Frame users, who may or may not own a PC capable of playing it? It’s true Valve considers Steam Frame a PC-streaming headset first and a standalone platform second, although the company has made a point of certifying over 100 PC VR and flatscreen titles to work in standalone mode on day one, including the company’s own flatscreen hit Portal 2.
That said, you won’t find Half-Life: Alyx on that ‘certified standalone’ list, simply because it’s just too compute intensive to run on modern mobile chipsets in its current state. But I wouldn’t lose hope entirely. There’s been chatter of Valve experimenting with Half-Life: Alyx running in standalone mode.
Valve hasn’t explicitly promised anything, however last November the company confirmed as much to UploadVR, noting that they were hoping to get Half-Life: Alyx running smoothly in standalone. Whatever the case, the wait can’t be much longer to find out that and the other two most important bit of info still yet to be revealed: price and release date.
