Alongside launching the ‘Steam Frame Verified’ label, Valve confirmed that the headset is shipping “this summer”.
When revealing Steam Frame back in November, Valve said it would ship in “early 2026”. For pricing, it told UploadVR it was “aiming” to sell Steam Frame for less than the $1000 Index full-kit.
But given the global memory shortage resulting from the rapid growth of AI, come February the company announced that it would need to “revisit” its “exact shipping schedule and pricing”.
This month, in a blog post launching the Steam Frame Verified program, Valve confirmed that both Steam Frame and the Steam Machine consolized PC will launch “this summer”, meaning sometime in the next three months.
Steam Frame Verified
Valve announced the specific criteria for VR titles to receive the ‘Steam Frame Verified’ label on the Steam store at GDC in March.
Steam Frame is marketed by Valve as a “PC streaming first” product, primarily meant for gaming PC owners, but it also supports fully standalone play without a PC, just like a Meta Quest or Pico headset.
The challenge with Steam Frame as a standalone experience, however, is that it accesses the regular Steam store, and the vast majority of VR content on Steam is designed to run on a powerful gaming PC that draws hundreds of watts from mains power.
Steam Frame is slightly more powerful than Quest 3, with around 30% more GPU power and eye tracking that can drive foveated rendering in supported titles. But it’s still significantly less powerful than a PC, due to running on a mobile chipset powered by a battery. While Steam Frame can run almost any VR title on Steam, it can’t run the majority well.
Since Steam Frame was announced, dozens of VR game developers have been working to optimize their titles to run standalone on Valve’s headset. Some are repurposing their Quest or Pico builds, leveraging the fact that Steam Frame can run Android APKs, while others are building a lower graphics tier than their current lowest.
For buyers of Steam Frame who want to use the headset standalone, Valve will add the ‘Steam Frame Verified’ label to games that it has tested and found to run well. It’s a continuation of its strategy with Steam Deck, which has a ‘Steam Deck Verified’ label.
The label will apply to both VR and flatscreen titles. For standalone VR, the title must run at 90 FPS, while standalone flatscreen games need to run at 720p 30FPS at minimum.
Valve’s 90 FPS VR requirement for the label is stricter than the Meta Horizon Store or Pico Store, which both allow 72Hz VR titles, including 36FPS reprojected to 72Hz. The PlayStation Store allows 60FPS reprojected to 120Hz as the minimum.
Study Finds 120Hz Is “Threshold” To Avoid VR Sickness
A recent study concluded that 120fps is the “important threshold” to avoid VR sickness for most people, at least on the Pimax 5K Super tested.
In VR, a higher frame rate reduces the feeling of sickness that some people experience. And below 90 FPS, with the kind of low persistence displays needed for VR headsets, many people can see a distinct flicker in the periphery of the image for bright scenes. Valve is thus prioritizing the user experience over having as many Steam Frame Verified titles as possible – a fascinating move.
Still, getting VR content built for a powerful gaming PC to run at 90 FPS on a 10-watt mobile chipset from late 2023 will be no easy feat for developers, and for some it will be a downright impossible task.
It’s a reminder of Valve’s “PC streaming first” positioning for the product, and that the company is sticking to the values the industry established in early 2014, when both Oculus and Valve declared that 90Hz was the minimum bar for high-quality VR.
“Like Steam Deck Verified, the Steam Frame Standalone Verified program focuses on the experience customers will have with the device out-of-the-box in standalone mode. The criteria are similar as well: the default graphics configuration needs to perform well, text and UI elements need to be clear and legible on the built-in display, and the default controller configuration needs to work well with the Steam Frame Controllers. The same test criteria apply to both VR titles and non-VR titles.”
Developers can read about the Steam Frame Verified requirements on the Steamworks website.
