In June I wrote that the headset had no launch game and that everyone should be worried about it. On August 6 a free Half-Life 2 mod cleared Valve’s own Verified bar and I came back to sort out which half of my argument had been wrong. Then last Thursday, in a showcase carrying more than twenty-five games that everybody remembers for System Shock and High on Life, a solo developer in Germany confirmed the third one with almost no fanfare. His shooter, Gunman Contracts – Stand Alone, goes on sale the same day the Steam Frame does.
Not bundled with the headset. No Valve partnership, no pack-in slot. He is going to put a price on it and press publish, on a date Valve still has not told anyone. Whenever that turns out to be.
He has been building this since 2021
Gunman Contracts started as a free Half-Life: Alyx mod. Chapter 1, “The Extraction,” went up on the Steam Workshop on September 12, 2021, made by a German graphics designer who goes by ANB_Seth. Road to VR called it the John Wick VR game we always wanted, which is exactly the right description and also exactly why it spread. Chapter 2, “Art of War,” landed the following January.
Now the part I cannot stop looking at. Chapter 1 has 309,185 lifetime subscriptions. Chapter 2 has 240,862. Those are Workshop numbers, on a mod, for a VR game that requires a gaming PC and a headset, built by one person, given away for nothing, and untouched since March 2022. A third of a million people installed it anyway. Plenty of commercial VR games never reach a tenth of that with a studio behind them, a marketing spend, and a publisher taking its cut off the top.
The standalone is not those chapters repackaged. Steam’s own page describes it as “a completely new, from-the-ground-up developed single-player experience,” published now by 2080 Games and playable both flat and in VR. The Alyx mods were the portfolio. This is the job they got him.
What you actually get on day one
Early Access, and he says so on the store page in language most publishers would have sanded smooth: the game arrives with “a limited set of content (and most likely quite the list of bugs and quirks!).” I would rather read that than another launch trailer.
The listed launch package runs to three fully voiced story contracts, each carrying Takedown and Last Stand challenge variants, a base of operations holding pop-up target courses and holographic combat training, and unlockable weapons you can customise across pistols, rifles and shotguns, plus knives and a bow. Steam leaderboards sit on every contract and every challenge.
There is also a feature I have not seen in a shooter in years. You drop your own music files into a folder and play them in-game through the Gunman’s smartphone. That is a small, strange, personal thing to bother building, and it is the kind of thing that only survives when one person is making every decision about what goes in.
The best public signal on Valve’s launch date is a modder’s Discord
Valve has committed to summer. Summer ends September 22. The company put a Great on Frame section on Steam back in July, cleared its last US regulatory gate on July 29, and has headsets sitting in warehouses. It has still not named a day.
