Valve Apologized to VR Developers in Seoul Over What the Steam Frame Costs

The event was Steam Indie Connect, a private night for Korean indie studios run by the Busan Indie Connect Festival committee and the Korea Creative Content Agency. Inven’s report on it, by Lee Du-hyeon, is mostly about AI clones and Next Fest. The VR part is the last question. The head of a VR studio asked whether Steam’s curation, visibility and policies for VR games would change now that Valve sells a headset of its own, and passed along a worry going around among VR fans: that Valve had given up on VR.

Tom Giardino, from Valve’s Steam business team, took it. Inven quotes his first line as “We still believe in virtual reality.”

Then he got specific, and very little of it was flattering. By Inven’s account, he said a considerable number of Steam Frame owners are not playing VR games on it at all. They play the ordinary games in their library and use the Frame as a screen. He called VR’s problem a chicken and an egg, with developers waiting for a bigger market and players waiting for more games, while flat games keep getting better and something like Escape from Tarkov turns up every week to take their time and money. He said rising RAM and memory prices pushed up the cost of all hardware, Valve’s included, and that Valve had wanted the Frame cheaper so it could bring new people in.

Then the line that matters. In Inven’s Korean, he said the moment Valve could have welcomed a lot of new customers “became a reason to wait or hesitate on VR,” and that he was sorry to VR developers.

One caution before anybody hangs a headline on a single English word. The session ran in English with live interpretation into Korean, and no public recording has turned up, so every English version of these lines is a translation of a translation. InvenGlobal’s English edition first printed “We feel sorry to VR developers.” By Thursday it read “I feel sorry.” The Korean has no subject at all. The meaning survives. The exact words do not.

Using it as a monitor was the pitch

The flat-games part is being passed around like a confession. I do not read it that way. Valve’s launch post on September 14 called the Frame a headset “built for both VR and non-VR gameplay” that “can handle your entire Steam library,” and Jeremy Selan told the BBC that day that the hope was people would play their non-VR games on it too. In July I argued that the killer app was your Steam library. People heard the pitch and bought the thing to do what it said it did.

What stings is hearing the other half of it from Valve. A Frame running Tarkov is a Frame not running a VR game, and a VR studio cannot sell anything to an owner who never opens one.

But think about where that owner is sitting. The headset is already on their face. Every VR developer I have ever talked to would give a lot to get a customer to that exact spot, because the hardest steps, buying a headset and actually wearing it, are done. It is the shortest walk in this whole industry. Somebody just has to put a VR game at the end of it.

What the sorry was for

Read the apology again. It is not about flat games. It is about price.