The Vergecast - Who is the $1,059 Steam VR headset for?

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Sean Hollister got his hands and face on Valve's new VR headset, the Steam Frame. It's expensive, starting at more than $1,000. It's buggy — he and CNET's Scott Stein both felt like beta testers as they reviewed it. But it's also full of interesting ideas, including the promise that Steam games could one day come to your mobile phone. This week on The Vergecast, Sean and Scott discuss who exactly this device is for, in a world that mostly seems to have moved on from VR. Further reading: Is it time for AI companies to press pause? Waymo pulls over, calls cops on riders with a ghost gun Your car is selling your data LG responds to TV spying allegations The Steam Frame is made for irresponsible hardware nerds like me Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of one-pound VR headsets. I'm Sean Hollister, and today we're talking Steam Frame with C-Nett Scott Stein. He's a friend, and both of us have reviewed VR headsets going all the way back to the original Oculus Rift. We were two of the first journalists to play with it, and now we've been reviewing Valve's new Steam Frame. Today we're going to give you the rundown, but I also wanted Scott on to talk about what a Valve headsets like to review, because this one feels a bit unfinished. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is 90 seconds of The Verge for Monday, September 14th, 2026.

Is that time for AI companies to slow down? All of a sudden, a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money from AI think so. Open AI CEO Sam Altman says we should slow down. Anthropics says we should pump the brakes. Even Elon Musk agrees. Microsoft suddenly saying people matter more than AI, that's a quote, and publishing a 37-page Code of Conduct. It's not clear whether they're actually scared for humanity or just their liability after

the next big AI hack, or if they're just trying to avoid regulation by making a show of regulating themselves. But you know who thinks we shouldn't slow down at all? Donald Trump and the Chinese government, who both seem to be enjoying the arms race. Speaking of AI, cars can now tell if you're armed. Terence O'Brien has the story of the Waymo Robotaxie that called the cops after its riders reportedly stuck a ghost gun to their Google car in San Francisco. Andy Hawkins explains how your own car is probably selling your data too.

And speaking of selling your data, LG has finally responded to the allegations that its TVs are spying on you. It says its TVs do not continuously record or transmit user conversations, but that continuously is doing a lot of work. You can read more at Theverge.com, and that's 90 seconds on the verge for Monday, September 14th, 2026. I've got a text. The summer might be almost over, but a new bombshell has entered the village. Meet the voices of Deepgram Flux TTS. I'm Drew. Low-key casual. I'm Alexis, an upbeat morning person. I'm Haley. Always cheerful. Flux TTS has some real personalities that are ready to speak. You can interrupt, pause, and keep talking without losing the plot. Fancy a chat? Come try all the voices free through September 12th at deepgram.com slash keep talking. Terms apply.

Scott, welcome to the Vergecast. Hey, thank you, Sean. It's good to be on here. There's like a reunion seeing you again. It's been a bit. Scott and I think I may have just mentioned, we spent a lot of time playing with VR headsets together over the years. And this one is something that I don't think I expected. This is the Steam Frame. And if you're watching a video of this, this is the Steam Frame with an Arcturist Vision

Cabra on the front. We both got them up here. And this is a VR headset from Valve that's not exactly just a VAT. VR headset. Can you tell me the basics a little bit? Sure. So, Valve has made VR headsets before. They were partners basically with HTCVive. If you know VR history all the way back when the Oculus Rift launched, they have had Steam VR. But what they're announcing here is in one sense, if you look at this, it's like a meta-quest. This is a standalone VR headset that Valve is making at long last.

But in the other sense, the frame, which is an interesting name, is this Steam-compatible gaming device. So it can play 2D Steam games, and it can also wirelessly connect with your PC. So it is a VR headset, but it's also being set up to play other stuff. Your mileage may vary. It plays standalone games on its own chip, on like a fairly weak compared to your PC, Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, like something that'd be in your phone. And then it also streams games from your PC. It's supposed to do flat games inside of there. Like you're playing your Hades 2.

You're playing your tunic in there. But it's also doing your VR expansive games. You can theoretically port VR games from a MetaQuest right over here. Take the Android version and put it on this headset, even though it's not exactly running Android. It's trying to do all of these things in one. And so while it looks like that MetaQuest, it isn't quite. that. And so you and I, we've spent this time reviewing it. One thing that we know that nobody else knew outside of the reviewer circle before today is the price. How much is this and how much does

that compare to those meta-quest to that valve index? Yeah, so not surprising, based on the cost of the steam machine. It is a thousand fifty-nine for the one with 256 gigabytes of storage, which is the entry one, and then it's 1299 for the one with a terabyte of storage. It's funny because, yes, that's expensive. But then also, if you've been looking at the prices of VR headsets and XR things, I'm not defending that price. But other than meta, they've all been, like, you know, the snap specs are like $2,000, the Vision Pro, and Galaxy XR was 1899. So, yeah, I mean, it's definitely not the console price I want, but that's what we're dealing with here. It's $1,059 and up.

I wasn't expecting this to cost 350, like the MetaQuest 3S or 600, like the Quest 3. I definitely knew it was going to be more than that because it's trying to do more and because it's Valve. But what surprised me is that it's not just the games. There's an entire Linux desktop in here running on that chip. You can run it side by side with the games that you're playing. I'm running Discord in a web browser to talk to my friends. Over here, while I've got a giant screen over there across my living room playing Super Battle Golf with those friends, like I can do multiple things at the same time. Valve exposes a lot more to the power users than Meta does than anybody else does, right?

Yeah, and I haven't even really started dipping my toes in that. Like I've opened the desktop, I've played around with some of the apps in there, I've done some browsery stuff, and then I've just gone back to playing games. But, you know, it's also partly like because, it's because it's Linux and because you're going to kind of have to like log in and download stuff, it's not as like lazy, easy where you're just going to like, you know, connect your ecosystem, like a Google or Apple. I mean, meta, you're starting all over again because you're, you know, you don't have your work apps or things easily logged in. But yeah, it does expose a lot more.

It allows you to fail, which is a very valve thing in the sense that, you know, you could launch something that doesn't run that well on it. And you can launch. any steam thing on it, you know, even if it's not approved, or, you know, like a great on frame labeled, including VR things. And you can just watch something totally fail out if you want, or you can try to optimize for a better experience or go the smooth, easier path. The whole steam frame, it's a stack of technologies to make things work on this phone chip that almost all of them were not designed to work on Linux on that chip.

There's the new Lepton compatibility later. You've heard of the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck runs Windows games on Linux with a technology called Proton, a compatibility later built on wine. This one has a new one called Lepton that does that for Android. Right. It also has a version of Proton that's been ported over to Arm, so it can run those Windows games on this smartphone chip on your face.

So when you put the Steam, Steam frame on your face. You and I have both experienced this. How does this compare to playing games on your flat TV, to putting on a meta quest, to putting on a vision? What do you see in here and how do you interact? So if you've ever used a VR headset, if you've used something like a meta quest, it's kind of similar in that what you see is suddenly you get this fuzzy camera pass through, like you can see through these black and white cameras. of your real world. You see the real world while this screen floats in front of you, that you can resize with your controllers. But not with your hands.

There's no hand tracking on this headset. You only use controllers, not yet. And then you browse, and if you use a steam device, like a steam deck or a steam machine, or steam in general, it's got a very similar layout. It looks like just that monitor,

that very familiar interface has popped up. Once you log in, and then you've got your games on there, et cetera. That just floating in your living room, that window. That just floats in your living room. And you can float it near in this little pop-up dashboard. Or similar to meta and others, you can hit a theater mode where it poop pops out far. And then it's a curved screen that you can then also make flat if you want.

You can make it so big. It's like my entire living room wall. Yeah, like a huge room filling thing, which is very fun. And you can also pop up other windows. if you want, although it's mainly designed, I think, to be that one screen. You can do others, and like you're pointing out, you could run other apps at the same time. And then you're using the controllers. So these controllers, which you hold in your hand, for someone who's used VR, very familiar in that you're kind of using them as pointers, because there's a laser pointer

that activates when you press this button that arcs across and you can click on things that you want from a distance. This isn't an actual laser. It's, it's, It's a virtual laser pointer that you're using to move your windows around and select things. That's exactly it. But then you can also click that again, and then you're in controller mode. And then these are all just the same as, almost the same as a Steam controller, minus the track pads. So you've got the Dpad and buttons. And so you can just browse around, click around like you would on a Steam deck, and check your menus, et cetera.

You can swap between. I really love the Laser Mouse feature on these. I mean, with the Vision Pro, if you're in the Apple Vision, Pro, you're using your eyes to look at things. And so you've got to like retrain your brain a little bit to be like, the thing I am looking at right now with my eyes, when I pinch that, it will move and make the window bigger or it will drag a window around and place it somewhere in my room. And with these, instead with the controllers, you click this button, and this button is the mode switch. So like, if I press this grip button on the controller, it's very clicky button one time,

it will go from, in the middle of my game, they are my hands in the game or they are my game pad in the game because they've got all the same buttons as like an Xbox game pad. They will go from that to becoming this laser mouse. And so in an instant, I can be like, oh, this window isn't as big as I'd like. Or no, I want this window to be on that wall instead instead of floating in the middle of my room. And so I'll just be like, okay, I'm going out of game pad mode, click the button, now I'm in laser mouse mode, drag that thing over there to that window where I want it instead, resize it a little bit to make it bigger or smaller. Maybe I'll even pick it up and carry it with me to another room. And then let go of it. Press that button one more

time and now it's my game pad again. It's this mode switching. I really like it, except when the laser mouse disappears and fails to work, which it has for me on some occasions. Yes, and I didn't even know how to make it work at first. I felt like an idiot because it was a little bit of fumbling where, you know, I saw laser mouse at the bottom and there were these trigger marker button indicators. And I kept pressing the top buttons here and going, oh, is that the laser mouse? And I was like, is this the laser mouse? There is no laser mouse. And then I finally realized, wait, it's the grip button that does the laser mouse and swaps, and then I really liked it. I do like that theoretically, and they haven't, like, mapped all the controls yet.

I think developers may have to do these per games, but you can theoretically use it as a mouse in your games, too. So when I'm selecting, you know, play a new game or changing the graphics settings in the game, I can use my laser mouse, press those buttons on the menus in the screen, and then just tap it again, and I'm back in in a gamepad mode, again, assuming the gamepad mode is recognized and it goes back into that. And then another feature, there's this steam button at the bottom here of each of the controllers. If you tap it one time, you'll make all of your extra menus and windows and crumbs disappear.

So then you've just got your floating windows. If you tap it two times, you can switch between your real world's pass-through vision of your living room, between that and the virtual environment where you're completely enclosed in a bubble of video game graphics. And so you can quickly swap between those things if you have to walk around your room or if you just want to be there with your wife on the couch like me versus I want to be fully enclosed

in a space that other people are not intruding in, which I like. And there's also spatial audio. What did you think of the spatial audio? Tell me about that. I thought it was fine. You know, I don't really think it like, it didn't shock me.

And it didn't, it didn't, maybe the fact that I didn't think about it is a good thing. Because when I was playing the 2D games, it felt very fine and natural. And in that sense, maybe the spatial audio applied to the 2D game theater experience was well done.

VR felt like VR, as I remembered. The speakers were reasonably loud enough. And yeah, I think, I don't know, I didn't think about it much, and that's interesting. The thing I do like, and maybe this is for productivity rather than for games, I ended up writing a bit of my Steam Frame review on the Steam Frame, which I always think is a fun gag

when you can do it. Absolutely. The windows in your world, if you pull a window out to the side, the audio comes directionally from wherever the floating window in your room actually is. So if I'm watching, you know, peeky blinders from Netflix on the screen in front of me, and I turn to the left, while I still hear the audio coming from that screen over there onto my right, no longer from directly ahead of me all the time. So it gives you that extra sense that the windows are where you place them in the world. They just don't necessarily stay where I placed them for me. I don't know if this happened to you a lot, but I would be manipulating some windows

or would be switching back to my Chrome so I can control where all these floating windows are in my house, and suddenly one of them would be down in my lap or pop up to the right of where I thought it was going to be, things like that. Oh, my God, and that's because I didn't even try opening a huge amount of windows,

but I kind of felt, I got the feeling that the frame was struggling if you push it. And that's where I kind of felt like, Unlike of, I mean, the Vision Pro is running an M5 processor, you know. So it's got a lot in there. Even the Galaxy XR with its chipset felt, you know, relatively fine. I felt the fan kicking in a lot on the steam frame.

And sometimes even some basic things, like I kind of finally learned how to record in-game clips and then convert them over to my phone. And it was chugging on that and getting real hot. not all the time, but I felt like there's sometimes a little stuttery slowdown when things like that happened. You and I've reviewed a lot of these products. We've played with a lot of headsets.

And VR is not in an amazing state right now. I would say there's not a ton of new stuff to play. And I don't know who this is for other than really nerdy folks like me who want to push it to its limits and do everything possibly, the thing they possibly can on it. I want to ask you about that.

And I also want to ask you what it was like to review this product. It is weird to review a headset. And it is especially interesting to review a valve product. We'll talk about why. Let me start with the first one, though. Who is this for? First thought I had was this is maybe for that person who had a valve index and was thinking, I want a Steam VR wireless headset that could be standalone.

and no matter what, and I want it to be made by Valve, there's that person. I think, though, there are so many VR headsets out there that work with Steam and with PCs that I feel like, you know, I don't know if you can justify that price for that. I don't think it's for the person that wants a portable game system because, to me, it has compromises compared to the Steam deck, and the Steam deck is already multiple years old. So not only does it not play the whole catalog, it's a subset of things. Like, it won't play. You know, I tried playing things like Eldon Ring, Spider-Man 2, Ratchet and Clank, forget it.

Played baby steps. You played some not authorized for Steam Frame games really well. Baby Steps, Victoria was great on it. Crazy Taxi, the old Crazy Taxi game. You know, some like nice surprises in there. You'll find nice surprises, but it's a real scavenger hunt. And then battery life, which I found really limiting on this. even more than I felt like other VR headsets.

I felt like I was kind of always ready to go for a recharge or to tether it. And then there's the price. Because also, like, as much as you may, and there are many reasons to be freaked out about meta, the fact is that the price that they've put it at and the game catalog on the Quest, it can't touch that right now.

So, you know, and the Quest is very versatile. So you kind of have this thing where you go, it's an amazing Swiss Army knife of an experiment. but in the current moment, very experimental. I think it's absolutely for early adopters who already have a powerful desktop PC and want to stream their games. Like you said, a Valve Index replacement.

So the Valve Index, for those who aren't aware of this, this was, I think it was $1,000, right? A $1,000 corded headset, wired headset that came out basically just as the industry had decided we didn't want, wired to be the way we do things, that the cord got in the way. And certainly, there were excellent experiences you could have while sitting with a cord, even standing with a cord if you weren't moving around too much. I remember Star Wars squadrons and jumping in that X-wing,

and that was just amazing to be in the cockpit of the X-wing playing that in VR, an entire full, you know, AAA game in VR that way. That was something special. Half-Life Alex, very special if you're standing around. And the teleport kind of controls in that game makes it, So you don't get tangled in the court too much. You teleport around with a thumbstick. You don't need it. By the way, there's a standalone version of that here on the frame. If you're the kind of person who has this beefy gaming PC and you're like, but my home network,

but I don't like the court, I don't want to trip over a court, but my home network is not great for streaming things. This comes with a six gigahertz dongle. It's fairly short range. I walked 12 feet away, 12 feet and one wall away and it kind of cut out. So you have to be kind of in the same. room or very close outside of the room for that to work. But if you're sitting in front near your PC, sitting in front of your PC, that gives you a dedicated wireless link so you're not

getting all kinds of lag. You get something Valve is calling a foviated streaming where it'll track your eyes many, many, many times per second and give you the highest resolution where you're looking and the highest streaming quality, I should say, where you're looking and lower elsewhere. That's super nice. I could imagine doing this with my powerful PC. I'm just not sure about if I don't have that, if I don't have, and if I don't have specific VR titles that I want to play, or if I'm not sure, I want to have this headset on my head. For me, sitting that 12 feet away on my couch, being an irresponsible person who likes to push hardware to its limits and being okay with being an early adopter, I'm like, ooh, I could play those games I'd playing in my PC instead of them on my 24-inch

monitor, I can play them on a screen the size of my entire living room wall, and that's cool. But do I want to pay the extra thousand plus for that? I'm not, I'm not sure. Yeah, absolutely. And also, we didn't even talk about the display, but just in terms of the display, it looks, again, I thought it was good. I thought it was fine. I didn't think it was spectacular. And it was, that's exactly where it's landing, where it's like 2160 by 2016 per I, LCD. Not OLED. Not OLED. It's kind of like Quest 3 equivalent. It's not Vision Pro. It's not Galaxy XR. And then also, you know, the pancake lenses, which are on there, are really nice and crisp.

Sometimes they're a little optical weirdness. And maybe it's also why I had to use prescription lenses, which, by the way, this doesn't fit my glasses well at all. I was going to ask you. Yes. For the listeners, Scott is notorious for having the biggest glasses in the industry of VR reviewers. I'm sorry, Scott. But it makes you an amazing review.

were among all your other talents because everybody comes to you after they do their review and they're like, but what did Scott say about glass? What Scott say about his glasses? So unfortunately, these are not smart glasses. These are just regular. These are my glasses. They're a cram. Now, I fit them in there, but I was jamming them in there. And they stuck when I took them out. Not ideal. Also, we'd kind of stick in there and fog up the lenses. So it was a miserable experience. And Zeni sent me prescription lenses to try with this. which was great. I didn't get them until this past week. So I've only had three or four days using the list. Now, I made a big difference. The other bummer is that their official prescription support is up to minus six. I'm a minus eight plus. Now, they modded special versions of the lenses for me that are not available for sale, but they actually work. Maybe I'm like a test subject. But I told them, make them because you can get my prescription on the quest. You can get my prescription on vision pro, things like that. But prescription is a real frustrating thing. So I, I, I do, you can, also, the headset's modular, not to get into this too much.

They have promises of a lot of modularity with this headset, including new fits and, and, and things, I hope they're a wider frame fits. I bet people are going to make them. There's a dedicated enthusiast kit coming. This is, this is what you're alluding to. Yeah. I talked about this with, with Valve in my interview. And so this dedicated enthusiast kit, not only is it going to have a headstrap, a whole new, like, modular headstrap with a new battery pack that's going to be. It's going to be one battery that's the same size as this is currently in the steam frame, which is about 21 watt hours.

It's in there. And it will have a second magnetic battery that will attach to the first one that is also the same capacity. So you can get double the capacity with that. It's also got over-ear floating speakers, kind of like the ear speakers for the valve index. I've been told that they're enhanced beyond that a little bit. Those were very well received when the valve index came out. Everybody was like, oh, this is the best audio you can get in VR. Well, they're doing that for the frame with this kit.

And it will come with several additional spacers for the front so that you can get more or less distance away from the lenses. I actually, being lucky enough to have 2020, I said, I want to be closer to the lenses to get even more field of view. I think there's actually too much padding in mind. With you, you'd probably want a little bit more. Yeah, a little bit more. And it's tough because I do want to get close. I just wanted to bring that up, but I think it's fascinating, and it gets into that modularity thing we were kind of hinting out with like the Arcturus Vision camera that plugs in. And how many more things could emerge?

How many more things could people hack? This is like a bridge, like an experimental bridge, and Swiss Army knife and like Rosetta Stone to all of the other things out there is like fascinating. But you get back into what is that now? What are Valve's plans with that? You know, you could turn that as made directions as you want, but it is, that is interesting. Support for the show comes from blinds.com. Your home should look and feel exactly how you want it to, down to the lighting. Sometimes all it takes to make a room feel finished is investing a good, high-quality blinds.

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Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. But VR is dead. right? Nobody's making new games for VR, are they? It's always like half dead. It's zomified for so long. But it does feel a little more dead now because meta is backing out of VR so much that, and previously had buried a lot of its stuff with Horizon crapware that, you know, people felt like their games weren't being seen. I remember talking to developers at Metacconnect, who felt like they were being kind of left out to dry when everything started moving to glasses. And that was the biggest VR console. And Sony, if they stopped doing

VR games. Yeah, the question is, it's like you have to reach an audience. If you have a steam deck, those indie games, you can play those a lot of other places. And you can also play them on a steam deck. But how many places can you play a VR game? I think this opens up ways, but it depends on how many they sell. And the number of VR headsets is diminishing. So I'd like to think that this opens a doorway for headsets and things to run games, to make it worth the while for indie developers, to struggle, to make a VR game. But I don't know. This is not going to sell a lot of things.

And will it encourage other developers? I think it's more like, like you said, it's putting arm-compatible Steam stuff out there for other things to take advantage of. Some will be immersive. Some will not. That it may not improve the number of VR games. I feel like the game industry did bend around the Steam deck at $400,

at $500. That was a really attractive portable. And the game industry was like, yes, we're going to support this. we want our games to run on this. We're going to get into that Steam Deck verified program. Here, at $1,059 for something that you've got to convince people to wear on your head, I'm not entirely sure all these VR developers are going to come out of the woodwork to support it.

But I do think the indie games will look great on it. Yeah, and I think that's exactly it. But I also, Half-Life Alex, we've got to talk about that. Okay, so Alex, which I think several Verge Staffords would say is the best VR game made. It came out in 2020. It was one of three promised full-length VR games that Valve said it would make, that Gabe Newell, the company CEO founder, said Valve would make. And then there was no word on the other two. We have no idea if they're ever coming. Valve dodged my questions on that. But this game, pretty good, right? It's pretty good. And it is by far the most impressive experience that I've had in Steamframe. And I think that it was made for that reason where Valve is, you know, showing what you could. could do to push this headset. Like, I mean, graphically reduced, frame rate for animations,

like characters that would be moving around is lower, but the refresh of the whole room is very smooth. So looking around, it's all smooth. It's teleporting. Sometimes you go up a ladder. I don't remember if it was always the case, but you just jump to the top now. Some animations seem like they were a little bit compressed. But I just kept feeling like, wow, I'm in this game and it's standalone. That's really cool. Definitely the hand track, The hand motions in animation were a little wonkier with the controller, but I was kind of blown away that I realized, like, wait a second, it's tracking the movement of my pinky,

and then I started to realize that, wait a second, this controller, I forgot, has capacitive sensors on grip. Capacitive touch sensors for every digit. It was fascinating. And it's the one where it's really being showcased, because right now the games that are being ported at this moment, and that gets to, we're talking about what it's like to review this now, Things feel like they're just being ported over to work as opposed to introducing anything that's particularly steam frame.

And sometimes even the frame rates are not or the refresh rates are not even up to the level that I would expect. But that may certainly change. But Alex, you know, yeah, that's the one where I thought, wow, this is actually possible. This is cool. I would actually play the game like this. I know that there is so much more this headset can do, both in terms of. of what the headset is capable of doing itself. For instance, Valve says they can add hand tracking to this.

They're working on hand tracking, not just controller tracking, both in terms of that and in terms of what game developers can take advantage of. Alex shows us, Half-Life Alex shows us, we can do the foviated rendering. You can make games with the kind of detail you see on PC VR, it's opposed to just mobile VR, if you add the foviated rendering and things like that. If you build it for this somewhat more powerful phone-style chip. Beyond that, we know that eye tracking can be used for more than just foveated rendering. We've seen on the PSVR 2 in the Horizon game that can be used to be like, I'm aiming my bow at a target.

I'm aiming my bow at this, at this, you know, this machine I'm trying to hunt down and save humanity. And it'll, it'll know that you are aiming at that and help guide your arrow there on the Vision Pro. We know that it can help you pick windows without having to swing around a laser mouse. and, you know, there's all kinds of things game developers could do here. But the state that this is shipping in is typical valve. We feel like we are beta testers. We feel, in some cases, alpha testers of this product that is not ready right now for anyone who doesn't consider themselves an early adopted.

Talk about what it was like to review this thing. Yeah, so you don't get a reviewer's guide. You know, there's no setup guide. There's maybe one page of instructions. on a couple of things to keep in mind, you're kind of figuring things out, like the laser mouse thing, or, you know,

where am I doing game recording, or, you know, kind of search up an answer or think about Steam, or what about performance settings? What about, you know, what else? Oh, what is the desktop mode? Where is that at?

And so it is like a, yeah, you're kind of just wandering and exploring and doing that and launching games to test them out to see how they work, not only looking at like any early console generally to see what games start appearing, but I was really frantically doing that, checking out the Steam store to go, what's great on frame now?

It's great on frame. And some of them still wouldn't run. Like, Super Hot for me wouldn't start until I turned on a compatibility layer thing in the properties. And then it seemed to work. I don't know why. But like the kinds of issues that we run into when we're testing early value, virtual objects, I've had them just disappear. I've had the audio of the headset just gone in the middle of a game.

I've had the entire headset wink out, like lose power on several occasions in several different games while plugging in the cord to extend the battery. And some of these things, you know, I would report them to Valve and I would feel like a beta tester and they would fix them right away. And in the next batch, you know, the next build two days later, I'm like, oh, well, now when I play Hi-Fi Rush, the dialogue, the audio for the character speaking, is no longer missing. Yeah. It's there now.

I wonder what happened. They fixed it. I had an issue where space pirate trainer, one of my favorite games to test VR heads with because you have these responsive like blasters or the space pirate blasting away at all these robots. And it requires very responsive aim and very quick controls and so on. that game just completely winked out the entire headset lost power in the middle of the game repeatedly. And I came back to it a few days later and it was fine. So I'm like, so what do I say in my review? Do I say in my review that this headset crashes all the time? Do I say in my review that this headset did crash? What I ended up doing and you'll have been able to read my review on the verge and you'll be able to read Scott's review on CNN. by the time you listen to this podcast. I'm writing that I feel like a beta tester.

I'm explaining exactly what happened to me. The most exciting thing I think about the frame, though, is even if it doesn't sell particularly well, even if people are like, I don't quite buy this mix of 2D games and lightweight flat games and VR games in the same headset, some of which are streamed from a PC, and some of which are running natively on it.

The technologies behind it, Valve has been quietly funding and piping in these technologies to play your Windows games on arm chips now. And so this could lead to a future where we are, we have steam on our phones and not just for Match 3 games, but for legitimate, you know, deep, deep games that will immerse you, in a way that most mobile titles don't necessarily today because most mobile titles now

are built for the least common denominator gamer, which, I mean, I love it. I love a good match three. But this is maybe pointing us at a future where you can do a lot more. And while I'm not going to be buying a Steam frame every year or two,

people do tend to buy phones fairly often, be upgrading those chips fairly often. So I'm very curious. to see if that is where we get a lot more immersive games in the future because of the work that they put behind this. And handhelds, where I think about, you know, not only the price launching up on gaming handhelds, which you've been covering a ton, and where the Windows handhelds are at, but if you

start having arm-powered smaller handhelds or like Steam Deck minis or, you know, enter a space where maybe they're more affordable to make and they can start running a wide variety of games, for the industry, that's really fascinating because maybe it makes it viable again. Maybe you get to the point where it's like, yeah, you start having these tweener products that can basically run a lot of stuff, not quite the whole bleeding edge thing of where some of the Windows handhelds have been heading, but most people would find it fine. And then there's a whole, like, it does feel like the paths running in many directions, because the thing I also think about is the whole glasses thing, because this is a VR headset

and we're entering to this world of ambitious glasses and glasses like stuff, and you can already connect a pair of display glasses to the Steam deck. And we saw in this past year, Xreal ORA, which is Android XR-based, which is coming out this fall, has a very VR-like experience on glasses with a processor puck. And it really wowed me because it's not the same as full VR, but there's also the reports of meta and its Phoenix head said that are going to be more glasses-like. So this feels like a bridge product to something like, you know, in the future, would you have a steam deck too and pair glasses that are more sensor studied and would basically give you a lot of the VR experience? Is, you know, and that's modular.

Like if, but it does feel like you're saying, Valve is opening a lot of the building blocks here. And that's really exciting. And then to offer people a path of compatibility is exciting. Okay. I got to ask the last question. We could talk about this for ages. But let me ask the last question. Would you buy one?

Not in this moment. I think that the price is too high and the compatibility is too funky. However, it reminds me of Steam Deck, where I remember when the Steam Deck, I did not review the Steam Deck when it first came out. And I saw reviews. I was curious about it,

and I was like, it sounds like too much for a project. And then it's, it feels like it crossed over to the point where it was like, oh, this is interesting. And then like a year or so later, I started playing around with them

and I was like, oh, I love this. I love this for what it's doing. And I feel like that's the point where I feel like when this stuff really unlocks some of those features and gets that deeper library support, I would be like, this is really exciting. And to get to that point of, hey, I'm not a PC gamer. I might be a PC gamer someday. It can be my bridge device to that.

It can kind of let me grow into that from the other end. and I find that really appealing. It gives you something to aspire into, where as opposed to the stand-alone's usually, you don't have a, you know, like, you could build a library that is waiting for you on your other PC to come. You don't have to wait for meta to curate and approve all the titles.

People can build all kinds of experimental shit. I feel, I feel similar. I reviewed the Steam Deck at launch. I called it a glorious mess. I said it was, I said it was not ready. I said that if it was sold it best by, people would return it in droves. These are almost my exact words at the time when the steam deck came out. But this is what Valve does.

It creates a product. It gets the hardware mostly right the first time after spending years on it. It ships it unfinished. And so I would not buy this today. But I may regret not having bought it in the future if it follows the same. same trajectory as the steam deck because, and this is the other thing, I enjoyed being a beta tester of the steam deck, and I'm enjoying being a beta tester of the steam frame. So if you're the kind of person who could see yourself, who think you might enjoy being, paying for the privilege

of being a beta tester, if you're the kind of person who think you might enjoy paying for the privilege of being a beta tester of a gadget that is theoretically this exciting and can too, as many things as it can already do just with some weird quirks. I don't know if you'd regret it. I feel like exactly, like you go on that ride, and I think this would be a fascinating one to do it for because there are so many doorways beyond which there could be things happening, things that Valve intended and things that Valve is opening the door for that they have not directly intended, but as part of the experiment here, yeah, I asked Valve

about like the name frame. And it's interesting because I tell people about it and they're not, they don't even know what that is, if they're not been following it. But I think it's deliberately named. I mean, they may explain it a little bit of why they named it that. But I think that it feels to me like a framework.

You know, it feels to me like a path with many roads going from it. And so I think that's really fascinating for it to watch how that evolves with this headset. That it's not going for just one thing here. It's been such a pleasure, Scott. Thanks so much for being on the Vergecast. Of course. We have to check in when this thing gets evolved more. Well, I think this is a six-month year-down-the-road kind of thing.

This is a long process. That's it for the Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline 866 Verge-11 or email Vergecast at theverge.com. And to support everything we do here and get ad-free podcasts, please subscribe to the Verge. The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larcuk. See you next time, Space Cowboy.