Valve’s Steam Frame impresses in testing, but its £1,089 price raises questions for VR

The BBC’s Tom Gerken says Valve’s Steam Frame is light, comfortable and capable of high-quality wireless PC streaming. However, its price—£889 for 256GB or £1,089 for 1TB—has renewed debate over whether increasingly costly VR hardware can attract a mainstream audience.

Valve’s Steam Frame has been released in two storage versions, priced at £889 for 256GB and £1,089 for 1TB. The BBC’s Tom Gerken describes the headset as a technically impressive device, but says its cost could reinforce concerns that virtual reality is becoming inaccessible to many potential users.

Gerken found the headset light and comfortable, partly because its battery is positioned at the back of the head rather than alongside the front-mounted screen. It uses flat “pancake” lenses, which allow users to see clearly when putting the headset on, and he reports that games such as the VR version of Escape Simulator run well.

The Steam Frame can play games on the device or stream them from a PC. Its most notable feature is “foveated streaming”, which renders the area where the user is looking at the highest quality while reducing detail in peripheral vision. Valve combines a home Wi-Fi connection with a dongle connected to the PC, and Gerken says the system enables high-quality wireless streaming without a cable. He describes Half-Life: Alyx as especially impressive under those conditions.

That performance may require further spending, however, since users need a capable PC to take full advantage of streamed games. Gerken also found that older non-VR titles, including Persona 5 Reload, worked effectively on the headset, although he questioned whether developers would optimise ordinary games for it or whether users would choose a headset over a television.

The pricing comparison is particularly stark against Meta’s Quest 3, whose 128GB model retailed for £480 in 2023, according to the BBC report. Gaming writer Christopher Dring told Gerken that VR remains a “high-end niche” and said Meta had previously subsidised its hardware. Valve developer Jeremy Selan said the company had hoped to produce a more affordable device but that global memory costs had affected it, adding that Valve had worked hard to reach the final price.

Other commentators offer a different perspective. UploadVR editor David Heaney told the BBC that Meta’s Quest 3S costs £320 and has sometimes sold for £250, putting it below several mainstream games consoles. He argued that VR is still in an early stage of development, comparable to personal computers in the 1980s, rather than being a mature mass-market technology.