In case you missed the news, I’ll briefly summarize: Valve has announced its new headset, the Steam Frame. The Steam Frame is a standalone device, but it is also amazing to stream content from your PC using a dedicated dongle. Valve has also announced a mini PC called the Steam Machine, where you can run all your Steam Games and stream them either to your Steam Deck or your Steam Frame. Steam Frame launches in early 2026, for a price that has been described as “less than an Index full kit”. For now, Valve is only shipping devkits to developers asking for them.
The Steam Frame is definitely a good headset, and I’m very happy it has been released. For sure, it is introducing some innovations, and for sure, it is going to bring some new gamers into VR. But at the same time, I don’t see anything that is disruptive for the market: the use cases it covers were already covered before, and its technology is just a good polishing of some technologies that were already on the market.
Valve extensively dabbled with AR games in the pre-Index times and ultimatly those efforts resulted in a spinn-off company that failed. Valve probably made the right call to not persue this further.
The promise of AR seems to be mostly outside of gaming, so why would Valve as a pure gaming company be interested in that?
I think their open approach to software and hardware and the extension slot in the Frame will lead to it being a nice option for AR researchers and tinkerers, but I think it is unrealistic to expect that innovation to come from Valve itself.