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.
No one who isn’t a venture capital weirdo actually gives a shit about “XR” or any kind of augmented reality.
Maybe I’m not phrasing that correctly for people with chronic brain rot to understand. Here:
Zero 👏 percent 👏 of 👏 ordinary 👏 users 👏 care 👏 about 👏 XR/AR.
For anyone doing the math at home, that’s even fewer people who than those who are potential VR customers in the first place, which are already objectively far fewer potential customers compared to, just for sake of argument, console sales or ordinary PC gaming.
I don’t know what it’s going to take for this to finally sink in for Big Tech. Possibly a shovel applied smartly upside the head. Users want to easily play VR games and watch VR porn, and maybe in extended use case scenarios have virtual work environments with multiple floating pseudomonitors or hang a virtual IMAX movie screen in space or whatever. The list ends right there.
No one wants to walk around outside with a bulbous display thingy on their face. No one wants to venture out into the world with their peripheral vision reduced to 110° and tripping over everything. No one has ever developed a compelling use case for ordinary consumers to have “content” (reality check: most of which will ultimately be spyware or ads) floated in front of their eyeballs mixed with the real world. The primary function people actually use the Quest/WMR/Frame passthrough for is brief stints for figuring out where they set down their coffee cup, or finding their keyboard, or avoiding stepping on the cat. That’s it. Monochrome passthrough is fine for that. Color would be neat, sure, but monochrome sensors are faster and have better dynamic range and higher sensitivity, which translates to better controller tracking performance, and that’s something everyone will bitch about if it’s bad.
Hololens was dead on arrival. The Apple Vision was dead on arrival. Android XR and by extension Galaxy XR are dead on arrival. Valve doesn’t need to make a bunch of compromises to compete in the “consumer XR market” because there is no consumer XR market. The Frame is a VR gaming headset designed as a VR gaming headset, for VR gamers. Period.
The Frame doesn’t have to “disrupt” anything. It has to do everything the Quest 3 does and manage do it roughly as well, while not being sold by Mark Zuckerberg’s creepy ass.