I’ve always loved VR. I bought my current headset – a Pico 4 – three years ago, for around £300/$400. While that particular model isn’t available in America for very questionable reasons, if I wanted an alternative and was willing to enter Zuckerberg’s walled garden (I am not), a Quest 3S is even cheaper. With good wireless support, color pass-through cameras and a robust native library of games even before connecting to a PC, I felt VR had finally arrived at where it should be. A new world of games, accessible for less than a Nintendo Switch 2.
While I understand RAM prices are skyrocketing, when Valve announced its entry into the lightweight, wireless VR field would cost a wallet-obliterating £889/$1,059 for the cheapest Steam Frame model, my heart sank. And worse yet, it wasn’t launching any new software to accompany it. The Steam Frame’s killer app? A native port of Half-Life: Alyx, an admittedly excellent game, but one released in 2020 with a mod scene that has largely moved on due to lack of support from Valve itself.
Even the store page for the Steam Frame proudly displays Moss Book 2 as one of the great games you could play on the Frame. And while it is great (as are many VR games – there’s a library here dwarfing any console for sure), the developers, Polyarc, recently closed its doors due to a lack of sales and funding, even after releasing a non-VR version. While there’s still a steady trickle of VR games, on the PC side of things, almost all the big players have tapped out. There are no big AAA releases to look forward to. No big next step for VR design. And the buy-in price to access this via Valve’s new hardware is triple what I’d be willing to pay for a headset. Quadruple that, in the case of Meta’s newly-announced lightweight VR glasses.
Despite all this, I love VR. It has filled the hole in my life where lightgun games and oddball titles with one-off peripherals (pour one out for Samba De Amigo and Steel Battalion) used to live. It features some of the coolest mech games, most terrifying trips through haunted wastelands and experimental arcade experiences around. VR isn’t going anywhere, with a slow but steady flow of new hardware and modders continually patching VR support into older classic games. But I also cannot fathom what the future of VR looks like, or if it even has one at all.
VR has filled the hole in my life where lightgun games and oddball titles with one-off peripherals used to live
If Valve and Meta are to be believed, VR isn’t an alternative to a lower-end handheld console. It is the domain of enthusiast tech nerds with money to burn. It is a whole medium with almost no major studios involved anymore, and even Meta’s big announcement showcase last week featured little more than rehashes and ports of ‘classic’ games, and many of those will remain exclusive to Meta hardware too. Valve has all the money in the world but without investing some of it into developers, I worry that unless the Frame sells unexpectedly well, that it too will lose interest in this field.
While I love my cheap, versatile little headset, and adore adding VR mods to classic games to experience them in new ways, I’d like for VR to grow and be supported once more. To be able to point to something big and new and exciting on the horizon to get other people on board with me. And a port of a six-year-old game, however good it was, isn’t going to cut it.
Steam Hype is the latest site in the Hookshot network, joining Nintendo Life, Push Square, Pure Xbox and the retro-centric Time Extension to cover all corners of the gaming universe. Hookshot is also partnered with the tech experts at Digital Foundry and is partnered commercially with IGN. As Hookshot’s dedicated PC gaming site, it’s got news of the latest releases, updates and mod drops, plus weekly roundups and a must-play monthly playlist to help you keep up with the never-ending deluge of new experiences.
