Who the hell is the Steam Frame even for?

25 August 2026

When it was released all the way back in 2019 (wow, time flies, huh), the Valve Index was the greatest virtual reality headset money could buy you - and it was a damn good deal too!
For “just” £950:

• The highest refresh rate on a HMD ever
• The sexiest controllers of all time
• Full finger tracking
• Pressure-sensitive grips
• Touch-capacitive buttons and triggers
• Truely premium BMR audio
• Gaming-first sofware made by competent engineers
• Gaming-first hardware made by competent engineers

Half of the stuff on here still hasn’t been topped by the way. And this was in 2019.

Any owner of one would happily argue it was, hell, even is, the LeBron of HMDs. If it weren’t for its unfortunate (but unavoidable for the time) shortcomings like needing base station tracking and Fresnel lenses and fairly low resolution by today’s standards display, it would still probably be my pick over the Quest 3. Matter of fact, you will still find new Reddit threads of people debating if they should pick up a Q3 or a second-hand Index to this day. If people have choice paralysis so bad between devices released 5 years apart that they make a Reddit thread about it, you know you had some real good fucking engineering going on.

All good things must come to an end

Sadly, as we we tumble further in freefall into VR’s inevitable decline, it looks like since 2023, Meta has come out on top - with their impossibly subsidised hardware seemingly being the end game for us VR enthusiasts, no matter if we like it or not.

And the Quest 3 genuinely does fuck. It is a damn good deal. A refurb’d one is £350~. Which is a great deal for what you get, given, of course, you do not mind big tech hoovering your data up (understatement).

However, I held out hope for Valve. Oh lord Gaben, I’m counting on you to deliver. I wished and wished for years. I want to believe. I want there to be a Index v2. I want rock the boat of Meta’s godawful VR monopoly for the good of the consumer.

And in 2025, deliver Valve did!

My shitty predictions

Note the date on this: (At the time, “Fremont” was Valve’s internal / leaked codename for the Steam Machine)

So immediately, I was wrong (COUGH COUGH PRICE), but also I wasn’t.

• It was announced at the same time as the Steam Machine
  • It would have released at the same time too if it weren’t for the great RAM crisis of 2026.
• You can buy with the Fremont… technically.
  • My language implies it was going to be part of a bundle and I don’t think the Steam machine is powerful enough for most PCVR titles? Who knows.
• Wireless VR streaming.
  • Yeah, that’s literally the entire focus - “streaming first”.
  • It makes zero sense to not pivot towards wireless VR as:
    1. Steam Link already exists for the Quest
    2. It’s so, so much easier
    3. Meta sell the bag (deliberately to keep people on their ecosystem) with wireless support, so refuse to design a decent headset purpose-built for streaming.
    4. Steam can generate free money by streamlining wireless PCVR without all the bullshit and just make it plug-and-play. Steam users already have a PC, and all their games on it.
• 2k120hz
  • yup!

So I knew what I was talking about. This was based off leaks and also common sense.
When the Steam Frame was announced with specs and all, I couldn’t help but feel a little miffed however. In spite of their marketing, this did not feel like a device designed for streaming first.

I’m going to write my argument by juxtaposing the Frame against its primary competitor, the Quest 3 - released in 2023.