t’s certainly been a journey for Valve. A week prior to the Steam Frame’s launch, we spoke with two engineers at Valve about the project: Joy Lyons, hardware engineer, and Jeremy Selan, software engineer. The memory crisis and the price were a big part of that conversation. From that chat, we can confirm that Valve had aimed for a lower price point than the one it’s launching the Frame for today.
Here’s Lyons on the memory crisis:
“We set out to design this hardware with one particular price in mind, but we’ve made choices to make sure that we’re making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase, they can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world.”
Lyons also said that forecasting for the cost of certain components used in the Steam Frame is an ongoing challenge.
Not exactly boding well of the Steam Deck 2.
It would be worth the price if they had more games to offer for it. They had how many years since half life alyx?
I’m hard pressed to blame Valve for that. They’ve made massive contributions to a VR ecosystem that almost everyone seems to have stagnated in developing for.
I love VR, but it is something strange to think I’m still mostly playing the same games I bought 10 years ago. Some big players got in on it, but only to port their titles (Bethesda, mostly). Some devs have made some really cool things and development has never ceased for them, but Alyx is an outlier, really. As much as I’d like to see a follow up from Valve, I’d as much like to see that kind of energy from anyone.
You could point to Meta VR exclusives, but they hurt themselves through exclusivity.
I dunno. Alyx is the only game that makes me want to try VR. Nobody is really making any VR games for PC at all so who is to blame?