Valve is readying up to take the fight to Meta’s Quest lineup and Sony’s PlayStation VR2, with its upcoming wireless Steam Frame VR headset. Valve leaker Tyler McVicker, in a now-deleted YouTube stream, claimed that the device will start above the $1,000 mark, which would make it one of the most expensive gaming VR headsets on the market.
When the headset was announced last November, the company claimed it would be priced below its predecessor, the $999 Valve Index. If this leak holds up, it seems that surging component prices, particularly for RAM and SSDs, could cause Valve to price the Steam Frame much higher than it originally intended. It wouldn’t be an unfamiliar story for Valve, after it launched the Steam Machine earlier this year at a starting price of $1,049 – around $300 more than it originally planned, with that rise also attributed to rising memory and storage costs.
While a four-figure price tag may seem eye watering, there’s something else to consider. While other gaming-capable headsets such as the Meta Quest 3 may be cheaper on paper, the lower-level hardware means they are often limited to less demanding games, unless hooked up to a standalone PC. The Steam Frame on the other hand, won’t need to piggy back off a gaming PC for many titles. It runs natively on SteamOS, and has powerful hardware baked into the headset, such as a 4nm Snapdragon ARM64 chip and 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM.
For those x86-based titles which are incompatible with the Steam Frame, it can be hooked up wirelessly to a PC through an included 6GHz wireless adapter, allowing for your entire Steam library to be played through the headset.
Valve announced the Steam Frame in November 2025, and promised a summer 2026 launch for its latest VR headset. However, with the end of summer getting closer, we’d expect to get final confirmation on pricing very soon. There’s plenty of signals that Valve are readying up for an imminent launch, such as a new page on the Steam Store which lists games which are ‘Great on Frame’ – such as Portal 2 and Hades.
