Steam Frame’s Price Hasn’t Been Locked in, But Valve Expects it to be ‘cheaper than Index’

By
Ben Lang
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30

Steam Frame, Valve’s next VR headset, has been announced, but the company has yet to reveal the price. However, the company says its goal is for Frame to be cheaper than its first VR headset.

Steam Frame has finally been revealed and is planned for launch in early 2026, but Valve says it hasn’t been given a price for the headset just yet. However, during an interview the company told Road to VR that it expects the price of Steam Frame to be ‘cheaper than Index’, without offering much more detail.

I take this ‘cheaper than Index’ statement to mean cheaper than the $1,000 ‘full kit’ cost of Index, which included the headset, controllers, and two tracking beacons. The Index headset alone, however, costs $500.

Although Steam Frame includes ‘less’ in the box than Index (because it doesn’t require external tracking beacons)—and therefore might seem like it shouldn’t cost as much as Index—it actually includes quite a bit more in the headset itself. Unlike Index, Steam Frame has an on-board Snapdragon processor, RAM, SSD, and battery. That’s in addition to more advanced optics and displays. For that reason, it makes sense to expect that Steam Frame’s price could land under $1,000, but maybe not by much.

More Steam Frame Announcement Coverage

Valve Unveils Steam Frame VR headset to Make Your Entire Steam Library Portable: Valve shows off Steam Frame, the standalone headset that can stream and natively play your entire Steam library—with only a few caveats right now.

Hands-on: Steam Frame Reveals Valve’s Modern Vision for VR and Growing Hardware Ambitions: We go hands-on with Valve’s latest and greatest VR headset yet.

Valve Says No New First-party VR Game is in Development: Valve launched Half-Life: Alyx (2020) a few months after releasing Index, but no such luck for first-party content on Steam Frame.

Valve is Open to Bringing SteamOS to Third-party VR Headsets: Steam Frame is the first VR headset to run SteamOS, but it may not be the last.

Valve Plans to Offer Steam Frame Dev Kits to VR Developers: Steam Frame isn’t here yet; Valve says it needs more time with developers first so they can optimize their PC VR games.

Valve Announces SteamOS Console and New Steam Controller, Designed with Steam Frame Headset in Mind: Find out why Valve’s new SteamOS-running Console and controller will work seamlessly with Steam Frame.

Steam Frame vs. Quest 3 Specs: Better Streaming, Power & Hackability: Quest 3 can do a lot, but can it go toe-to-toe with Steam Frame?

Steam Frame vs. Valve Index Specs: Wireless VR Gameplay That’s Generations Ahead : Valve Index used to be the go-to PC VR headset, but the times have changed.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Ondrej

    Their low cost competitor has color passthrough.

    So it's either similarly priced or they are as delusional as with Steam Machine having weaker GPU than base PS5.

    • Eli

      Valve's biggest competitor in the PCVR space is the Bigscreen Beyond, which doesn't have even cameras or passthrough. It is only a very small minority of VR users who are interested in mixed reality applications at all.

      • Rock

        Yeah me and my gf are thinking of switching to the SF when it comes out simply because of the steam link capabilities and the fact that it's got eye tracking color pass through is great, but its still extremely fucking blurry and not always functional.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      The PS5 GPU uses 36 RDNA2 CUs manufactured on a process from 2020, the Steam Machine GPU uses 28 RDNA3 CUs on a process from 2025. It is very unlikely that the PS5 GPU will outperform the much more modern architecture on the Steam Machine. RDNA3 offerers a ~50% improvement in performance per watt over RDNA2, although this doesn't translate directly into similar performance gains in games.

      • Gamertag

        The Steam machine GPU is basically just a 7600M with the power turned up 20 watts, the PS5 is roughly equivalent to a 6700 non-XT, I imagine with the extra 20 watts the steam machine will be close to a 5700XT in terms of graphics capabilities, which is still slower than that 6700

  • A Random Commenter

    Until you can get a good VR headset off a Walmart shelf, this will remain niche even in this decade.

  • FRISH

    Cheaper that the index headset alone would be great. Cheaper than the full kit where it doesn't even include the base stations would be a bad price imo. It's been 2 years since the quest 3 so having the same resolution would be a let down if you have to pay more.

  • Jonathan Winters III

    Eye tracking adds a lot of cost as well.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      No, eye tracking doesn't add a lot of (hardware) cost. Basically none. Never has. The USD 249 Tobii/HTC eye tracking modules are less than USD 10 for a pair of IR cameras, a few cent for a couple of IR LEDs, some tiny SoC doing some preprocessing and USB communication, and more than USD 200 to recoup Tobii working on eye tracking for two decades, sitting on a mountain of patents and developing an add-on selling in only very low numbers to enterprise customers. The main reasons so far not to integrate it everywhere is that the processing of the images plus the software to then properly estimate the gaze direction for the next frame is very expensive on mobile SoCs, and probably the need to navigate a jungle of patents.

      I recently bought a couple of 3MP nIR cameras with fisheye lenses to be paired with ESP32-CAM modules for DIY eye tracking. Each camera is ~10mm wide and cost less than USD 4, and more expensive because I needed the ones with 60mm connectors. Each connects to a single ESP32-CAM with a cheap, but powerful ESP32 SoC running the free EyeTrackVR software and sending the camera image to a PC. I bought two of these for about USD 6 each, and they already included 2MP cameras, just not the type I needed for eye tracking.

      All this still lies in a project box, but EyeTrackVR has allowed to add eye tracking to pretty much every HMD, and they provide templates for 3D printable lens attachments to hold the cameras for most HMDs, which also carry a number of IR SMD LED. These were the hardest to come by due to needing very specific ones. About USD 8 incl. shipping for 100 XL-3216HIRC 850nm infrared SMD LEDs, at most eight are actually needed.

      And the less than USD 30 cost include two rather powerful mini computers capable of running a tiny real-time OS, just to pump the image data from the camera to the PC's/HMD's processor. Something that wouldn't be necessary for Valve, which would connect the cameras directly to one of the many MIPI/CSI ports of the Qualcomm SoC, and use smaller, lower resolution cameras. Most eye tracking uses one or two 400*400 IR cameras per eye.

      • psuedonymous

        "Any eye tracking is cheap" is about as valid as "a HMD is just a monitor on your face".

        For a desktop system like the Tobii, you can tolerate multi-frame latency with minimal issue. For eye-tracking for foveated rendering (or encoding for that matter) your "photons to tracked motion" latency neds to be low enough to inform the frame currently being rendered. That brings latency caps down from hundreds of milliseconds to the single-digit millisecond to microsecond range.
        Then you have the penalties for mistracks. For desktop use, if you're in the portion of the population that is outside the range your system can comfortable handle, then some 20%-50% of you target market finds that 'view clicking; is more annoying and needs a extra attempt sometimes, and the worst-case fallback is leaning forwards and grabbing the mouse. For foveated rendering, poor tracking means the basic act of viewing the HMD fails.

        And this isn't trivially solvable in software. The basic act of encoding the video and passing it to another device can blow your latency budget several times over. You're basically stuck with performing the processing on a device directly connected to the cameras, and ideally doing so on the cameras themselves (e.g. bonding an IC to the sensor die, if fabbing the processing IC on the backside of the sensor die is too high volume to achieve).

        The hard part is not just 'eye trackin', but doing so in a performant enough manner for it to be useful beyond a gimmick.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Prophesee showed event-based cameras with integrated logic that only report changes in May 2025. They had partnered with Tobii to make these usable with eye tracking, while their typical use case is detecting vibrations, as they can report changes at up to 10KHz, while nobody has used eye tracking cameras with more than 120Hz. Pupil detection is extremely simple and cheap and can run on an ESP32, and this would be sufficient for something like avatar gaze direction in VRChat.

          For ETFR you don't only need low latency, you primarily need to predict where the eyes will look in the next frame, not the current one. And this comes with a number of issues, like the eyes making very short side-and-back movements that help with depth recognition only taking a few milliseconds. You don't want to accidentally misinterpret these saccades as the user moving the eyes somewhere else.

          And this interpretation is apparently the main issue with bringing eye tracking to mobile HMDs. On the HTC Vive Pro Eye the Tobii PC software ran a high load "motion estimation" process, still resulting in 50ms latency. On the Quest Pro the estimation was apparently not very precise, requiring a still very large area to be rendered at high quality to avoid artifacts being visible, which combined with the compute cost for the estimation itself made ETFR on Quest Pro mostly pointless.

          We don't know what exactly Valve did for the Frame, but they don't use event-based sensors, just regular (AFAIR 120Hz) lores nIR cameras, which are rather cheap. They apparently did a pretty great job at least for foveated streaming, as several of the people that tried it said they couldn't manage to detect any quality changes even when trying through quick eye movements. Similarly people on PSVR2 were never able to catch the ETFR degradation, while it was pretty obvious to those watching the game play on a TV. In contrast people can see ETFR artifacts on the 3.5K M2 AVP heavily relying on it, and as mentioned, it is barely usable on Quest Pro.

          So apparently Valve found a way to come up with a very low latency eye tracking solution that is robust enough for streaming at 120Hz while only using the same technology that others have used before. During the hand-ons someone stated that the TDP (either only SoC or System) during streaming was 6W, and that foveated streaming was on by default, so it can't be too compute heavy either.

  • xyzs

    Well, it better be…

    LCD, 2k, 110 FOV, even if the Valve ecosystem is appealing, people will not spend crazy money over these very mid/low specs (for 2026 onward)

    If Meta Quest 4 comes with OLED, and better FOV for a similar price, Valve will not sell.

    • kakek

      Oled doesn't work well with pancake lenses. It's one or the other.
      If you want the benefits of both, you need micro led. And you get to 1500+ $ headsets.

  • Jose Ferrer

    The Index heaset alone was 499$, and with controllers (without base stations) was 749$.
    Therefore the new Steam Frame should be less than 749$.
    And if they are clever (for sure they are), they should also sell the headset alone for people who don´t need controllers (Flight sims, race sims, space sims, etc) o even allow the possibility to use the old index controllers with basestations.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      These controllers are very cheap to produce, possibly less than USD 30 for two, even including LRA/VCM haptics and tons of touch sensitive inputs. This stuff is just cheap, you can get a pack of 100 TTP223 touch sensor mounted on PCBs with connectors for use with Arduino for less than USD 6 on AliExpress. The Xbox One controller sold for USD 60 cost USD 15 to produce.

      So leaving out the controllers probably wouldn't save a lot money, and as Valve doesn't offer hand tracking on Frame (yet), would leave users without any way to configure anything on the HMD itself, like entering the password for an existing WiFi router. You'd basically have to first connect a mouse/keyboard to the USB2 port on the front of Frame, intended for experimental extensions.

      • Jose Ferrer

        Production cost is not only raw materials.
        With the Index controllers alone were 279$.
        Or +250$ when they were bundled with the headset.
        I don´t know the raw materials cost of the Index controllers but perhaps a small fraction of it.
        My point is that with the Index they were giving the option to acquire it with or without controllers and this was a nice option for me (and people who just want it for sims or had previous controllers). It would be interesting to know how many people bought the index with/without controllers, Valve will know that.
        For example, BigScreenBeyond or Pimaxes are sold without controllers because their users don´t need them or already have other controllers or entry methods.
        Regarding the wifi config for sure Valve can find an easy way to intro the wifi password without controllers.

  • zaelu

    If they ask more than 500 (ideally less… 449 – 499 etc) it will be a uphill battle for them.
    The chip is a 2 years old phone chip – that could be even from not ideal batches as thermals are less strict compared with a phone.
    They have included a lot of ways for them to extract more money via upgrades and accessories down the line… not to mention the Steam Store.
    For me it looks intentionally lower specs to be aggressive on the price.
    Imho, Index is no way a good comparison. Way more complex tech for that year and way more money in that C0v!d market with people staying indoors and having money for free. And Index had it easy and basically failed. Frame has it harder and must not fail.
    Today… is the "A.I. Bubble bursting and obliterating Solar System economy" year.
    Also the VR industry has darker horizons (pun intended) today than 6 years ago.
    The competition has way way way better hardware… even if "arguable"… they can just brag about more resolution alone and it can pour led into Steam Frame's boots. I have a Pico 4 with 2160×2160. I would most likely switch to Steam Frame but not for high end price. No way. I know the limits of this resolution. You can look straight and negate completely any advantage from a Foveated rendering and encoding and you can see some stuff no matter what insane super-sampling level you put on it. 3480×3480 per eye etc… You can't beat reality limits. Meta has tech that can obliterate Steam Frame in one month…
    And man Pico 4 has color passthrough… Ultra has even stereo.

    More than 500 makes no sense for me. It actually looks like a stall and a suicide. When I see people talking about 800-ish… I smile. They don't feel the heat yet. It's coming…

  • Paul Bellino

    All It needed was color passthrough, OLED, Wider Field of view, Higher resolution, plus a direct to Display port connection. Without these things they are totally dead in the water. Valve used to stand for cutting edge, Now they stand for just getting by. No one that is into high end VR will buy this. With the Eye tracking solution that they have they would have eaten the competition. And to boot we get no Half-life Alyx 2. Valve what were you thinking. Even Sadly its Bradly is Disappointed in you. You have let down some of your biggest fans. This simple is not good enough…..

    • zaelu

      Almost nobody is on "High End VR" ;) Pimax has 0.66% Steam VR Headsets market, BSB has 0.85% , ShiftAll and Play for Dream and the rest all together have 0.67%. And besides PFD all of these… so called high end are SteamVR locked and chocked and ready to be delivered next year to the Heavens.
      Valve knows it.

      • Tabp

        You're delusional. The most common high end setup is having both an Index and either a Quest Pro or Quest 3 with a Vive/Tundra tracker mounted on it. Selling hardware that's still not universally better than what people already have is not a great strategy. All of the things you named have serious drawbacks. As Varjo Aero demonstrated, simply putting a high price tag on something doesn't stop it from being worse than the Index in practical real life consumer use.

        • zaelu

          I don't understand what are you responding.

    • Zombie

      They wanted to make a high end headset they would have. But they wanted to make a headset that is more accessible.
      They made it cheaper, they made it so it's easier to bring with you and easier to use.
      So they succeed perfectly in what they aimed form.

      But sadly It's an entry headset, so not for people that are VR fans.

      • Fred

        Hey I'm a VR fan, have used loads of different VR headsets at work, but still have an OG Vive at home. The Frame will be a big upgrade for me, and the fact it's a full Linux PC on your head is a massive bonus.

  • AniEars

    I think all of the stuff like monochrome passthrough, an older chip, not a high-end but a reasonable resolution, a common FOV is all done to get the price low. The Quest 3 has no eye-tacking but colored passthrough and cost 500$ in 2023. Next year is 2026 so you can expect the dated chip, panels and monochrome cameras to be quite a bit cheaper now.

    i think we will see a price of 400 to 450$, i don't think it's successful if it's more then that

    • Zombie

      With Quest you pay with your data instead of your wallet. and your soul, it's in the TOS

      • Poseidon

        Yeah no kidding, the new stupid immersive homes update made my quest 2 non functional due to the ram getting filled, and the whole OS is an add for their stupid platform.

  • 2SyriuS

    As I see the specs, the only outstanding part is steam os and air link, the price range should not be higher then the quest3 for this