That was not the line anybody was waiting for this morning, and I include myself, because for ten months the only question this headset ever got asked was what it would cost, and at 10:01 Pacific Valve answered it. Alex has the full price breakdown, and Nina has the reservation rules, which close Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific and carry a purchase-history requirement you should check before you get your hopes up. Go read those. I want to talk about the game, because I have spent three months of this column being wrong about it in installments.
The column I keep correcting
On June 6 I wrote that <a href="https://comicvibe.com/valves-steam-frame-vr-headset-finally-arrives-for-1059/" title="Valve's Steam Frame VR Headset Finally Arrives for $1,059″>Steam Frame still had no launch game. The load-bearing evidence was a report from the November reveal, where Road to VR said a member of the Frame team denied that Valve had any VR content in development. I took that at face value and built a whole argument on it. In August a free mod, Half-Life 2: VR Mod, cleared Frame Verification, and I walked back half of it. The library was going to come from volunteers, I decided. I closed that piece by saying I still wanted Valve to make something.
Valve made something. It just was not new.
According to UploadVR’s rundown of today’s announcement, Valve built a native 64-bit ARM version of Half-Life: Alyx that runs standalone, and the company points to eye-tracked foveated rendering as the breakthrough that made it viable, stacked on top of more than a year of work across the Vulkan graphics driver, SteamVR, and the game itself (some of which, including depth reprojection, carries back over to the Windows build). No content was changed. That is why Workshop items work. Steam Cloud keeps your save in sync, so you can start a chapter standalone on the couch and finish it streaming from your PC.
More than a year.
If that phrase means what it says, the work was already underway in November, when the denial I leaned on so hard was given. I do not think anyone misled Road to VR. Porting a 2020 game to a new chip is not what most people mean by “VR content in development,” and honestly I might have answered that question the same way. But I read the quote as Valve having no interest in software for this headset, and what Valve was really doing, quietly, for over a year, was spending engineering time making the single most important VR game it owns run on a mobile Snapdragon strapped to somebody’s face without a gaming PC anywhere in the house.
That is a launch game. I should have left room for it.
Who a six-year-old game is actually for
I have called Alyx the gold standard for years, and nothing about today moves me off that. What I underrated is how many people have never played it. Alyx has always needed a gaming PC with a real graphics card, and the most popular VR headsets of the last five years have been standalone headsets that plenty of their owners never plugged into anything.
