Valve Confirms Steam Frame is Still Coming This Year, Now Marked as “coming soon”

By
Scott Hayden
-
29

Valve’s upcoming standalone VR headset Steam Frame is still shipping sometime this year, the company says, as it is now marked as “coming soon” on the Steam backend.

In a hardware news update last month, Valve announced that Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all being affected by the wider RAM and storage component shortage. Parts woes notwithstanding, Valve said in February that its goal was still to ship in the first half of 2026.

Now, according to the Steam backend (via SteamDB), Valve ha marked all three of its forthcoming products as “coming soon.”

Whether that means “soon soon” or “Valve soon” remains to be seen, although the company gave another vote of confidence in release plans in last week’s 2025 Year in Review.

Photo by Road to VR

“We shared recently that there have been challenges with memory and storage shortages, but we will be shipping all three products this year. More updates will be shared as we finalize our plans,” the company says.

Notably, Valve still hasn’t indicated prices for Steam Frame, Steam Machine, or Steam Controller. At its November reveal, Valve told Road to VR that it expects Steam Frame to be ‘cheaper than Index’, although the company didn’t qualify its pricing logic. This could put it somewhere between $1,000 (Index headset, controllers, SteamVR trackers) and $500 (Index headset only).

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As for Steam Machine, YouTuber ‘Skill Up’ confirmed with Valve back in November the PC won’t be subsidized like a console. Alternatively, Linus Tech Tips has suggested the lowest configuration could fetch somewhere around $700, which was based on a custom PC built on comparable parts.

Whatever the case, we expect a ‘buy now’ button to unceremonious appear on the Steam Frame page at some point, as Valve isn’t exactly known for the typical sort of fanfare seen with other companies.

Looking for more Steam Frame news?

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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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Herbert Werters

    F5

  • MosBen

    Looking forward to it. I decided to bite the bullet last Fall and built a mini PC that I installed Bazzite on instead of waiting for the Steam Machine. It's more powerful than the Steam Machine will end up being and I lucked into just barely getting hit by the start of the RAM crisis while also getting a graphics card at MSRP before they started rising too. But I can't make my own Steam Frame, so I'm eager for that to come out.

  • Tech

    I can't believe they ended up with 2k per eye, a resolution of 2.5 years old Quest 3. I was expecting a nice 2560×2560 at least – would make a huge difference for Quest 3 owners. You get a better quest with the same specs many years later and very likely 2x more expensive.

    • Rosko

      I guess there will be limitations regarding standalone, higher res, higher resources. I still don't quite get the standalone part is it going to have its own games like quet?

      • NL_VR

        Yes, there were leaks showing games releaseing as stand alone APK versions on Steam. one of them was Walkabout iirc.
        So its up to the devs to provide a stand alone version of their games… i even think they can release Stand alone only also because Steam Frame runs linux and has Steam installed from start

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Looking at Play for dreams and the Samsung galaxy XR, both have 4k/eye displays yet with slightly improved SoC as the Q3.
        the Frame will be able to play PCVR games on the device itself (of course don't expect higher settings to work well), and natively developed games.

    • zaelu

      no worries by the time they finally release it in 5 years they will update the screen to 2.5k :D

  • xyzs

    This decade, very probably, the said.

    By the time it's released, LCD VR will be even more obsolete.

  • zaelu

    soon to be delayed sine die… you watch it go… bye…

  • XRC

    Not a great year for VR with rising PC component pricing making PCVR increasingly unaffordable and now the delay/uncertainty of pricing Steam Frame.

    Sympathy for Valve's HW team, it sucks to word hard on a product for years, only to experience massive turmoil entering production, with a likely result that their new product is delayed until irrelevancy or priced out of the market.

    • blame fckkking fascism and trump who is 100% behind this with his BS tariffs and his allowing the tech bros to have insanely corrupt monopolies from nvdia to ai to ram makers all rigging the market and pushing consumers out. This is what hiring war monger nazis gets you every time.

  • Naruto Uzumaki

    Just wait for quest 4 at this point

    • NL_VR

      No more Meta

      • Frantax

        No more LCD.

        • Astor

          no more 2200x2200ish pixe… wait the steamframe still has that… :(

        • NL_VR

          Wouldnt touch Meta even if oled, sorry. i send my money elsewhere

          • Frantax

            I don't care about childish brand wars. No OLED/micro-OLED/"local dimming LCD", no buy. No exceptions.

          • NL_VR

            its not about brand its about open ended OS and ecosystems. i think we should all move away from the close ecosystem run by few big companies.

  • Oxi

    I personally expect the 1TB model to reach $999

    • Andrew Jakobs

      I expect the 1TB version to be WELL over $999. My bet is, the lowest version of Frame will be at least $999(ex vat).

      • Oxi

        I could see that, prices are absurd right now.

  • I have 2 issues with Valve's Steam Machine, the graphics card rumored to be only 8GB GDDR6 and VR. I believe VR is a dead tech that serves a tiny niche.

    I'm pretty sure people are willing to spend up to $1,200 for a 12GB graphics card Steam Machine, over a rumored $1000 8GB.
    This is a problem IMO and will hurt overall sales.

    The ideal Steam Machine that would probably sell well: 16GB GDDR6, AMD Ryzen 6/12 Core CPU and 32GB Ram, though 16GB is the absolute min and superfast M.2 1TB card.

    • NL_VR

      Maybe later in time someone will release a more powerful Steam Machine, but Valves steam machine you more gonna see as a ref design. it compares with the most common hardware used on Steam.
      Why you mix in the old doom and gloom VR is dead tech with it i wonder but VR is not dead tech. if it wasnt dead it wouldnt even be for a tiny nische.

    • Arno van Wingerde

      Well, according to Valve the Steam machine was I believe “better than 70% of Steam usersl, so I believe you overestimate what most people actually have. Compared to the standalone Quest3 it is a huge step up, and on the PS5 I have seen how good NMS already looks. But yes, to run normal AAA games in re, which is kind of what you are doing in VR, more is better…

  • MrGreen72

    Fuck AI. FUCK IT!

  • I WANT COLOUR PASSTHROUGH for 1000!!! otherwise wtf are we doing here!? I use it daily and have since q3. To ask me to go backwards to some janky ass spec q2 level nonsense is not ok especially when i want to get away from fascist anti consumer meta. But i also want a new half life but where is that!?!?