Valve Tells Korean VR Developers the Steam Frame's Price Made Players Hesitate

Valve rarely talks about its VR strategy outside patch notes and hardware pages, which is why remarks made at a small developer event in Seoul this week are getting attention.

Where this comes from

The comments were made at Steam Indie Connect, a private evening for Korean indie studios held Tuesday in Seoul’s Gangnam district and run by the Busan Indie Connect Festival committee and the Korea Creative Content Agency. Korean outlet Inven reported on it, and VR.org’s English write-up is based on that report. The session was held in English with live interpretation into Korean, and VR.org says no public recording has surfaced. Everything below is Inven’s account as relayed by VR.org, and English wording of the remarks varies between versions, so we’re paraphrasing rather than quoting.

What Valve said

The head of a Korean VR studio asked whether Steam’s curation, visibility and policies for VR games would change now that Valve sells its own headset, and raised a concern among VR fans that Valve had given up on VR. Tom Giardino of Valve’s Steam business team answered, and Inven quotes him opening with: “We still believe in virtual reality.”

According to Inven, Giardino said:

• A considerable number of Steam Frame owners aren’t playing VR games on it, and instead play regular games from their library with the Frame as a screen.
• VR has a chicken-and-egg problem: developers wait for a bigger market, players wait for more games, and flat games keep competing for their time and money.
• Rising RAM and memory prices pushed up the cost of all hardware, including Valve’s, and Valve had wanted the Frame to be cheaper so it could bring in new people.
• The launch, which could have brought in many new customers, instead became a reason for people to wait or hesitate on VR, and he expressed regret to VR developers over that.
• The Frame is one part of the VR ecosystem, and he pointed to Valve’s work on Steam Link for Quest and OpenXR so owners of other headsets can use SteamVR.

VR.org notes that Inven’s report doesn’t show any answer to the developer’s actual question about curation, visibility and policy for VR games on Steam.

Context

Per VR.org, the Steam Frame launched at $1,059 for 256GB and $1,299 for 1TB, Valve pitched it for both VR and non-VR play, and Valve’s launch post listed South Korea as “coming soon” with no date given since. VR.org also reports that Valve’s September hardware survey put the Frame at 0.41 percent of VR headsets on Steam after 13 days of sales.