Leaning further into its ‘Steam Fest’ promotions, Valve today kicked off its first ever Steam VR Fest which is bringing a load of discounts and demos for VR games.

Update (July 18th, 2022): Steam VR Fest is live, offering up deals and demos on a ton of VR games and experiences. Here’s just a taste of what deals you can find on Steam from today until July 25th.

Under $30: Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, Half-Life: Alyx, Zenith: The Last City, Boneworks, After the Fall, No Man’s Sky, Into the Radius, Moss, Wanderer, Green Hell VR

Under $10: Pavlov, Elite Dangerous, DiRT Rally 2.0, Forewarned, Superhot VR, Elite Dangerous, Arizona Sunshine, I Expect You to Die, I Expect You to Die 2

There’s also a convenient demo section, with demos already on offer such as: Hitman 3, Ruinsmagus, Carly and the Reaperman, Project Cars 2, and Compound

There’s also a ton of upcoming demos under the Coming Soon’ section, including: Samurai Slaughter House, Into the Darkness VR, VR Giants, Kartoffl, The Break-In, Requisition VR, and Paradox of Hope VR.

The original article follows below:

Original Article (July 12th, 2022): In recent years Valve has begun hosting seasonal Steam Next Fest promotions where the platform highlights demos of upcoming games and foists more sales on your wallet than it can possibly bare (as is tradition). VR games are often part of the mix during these promotions, but now the medium is getting its own spotlight.

Next week from July 18th–25th, Valve is set to host its first ever Steam VR Fest, giving a special emphasis to many VR games available on the platform. The promotion will work much like the other Fests in that it will highlight fresh discounts and demos of VR games.

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Valve says the event will be “promoted significantly on the homepage of Steam and via our social media channels.” Maybe Valve will even use the event to offer a discount on its Index VR headset for the very first time?

So make sure to straighten up your Steam Wishlist; you’ll get a notification if any of the VR games on your wishlist go on sale during the event.

Developers interested in participating can learn more about Steam VR Fest here.

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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."
  • Ad

    This will either be exciting or a complete train wreck.

    • BananaBreadBoy

      Would have to be pretty bad or controversial to be a train wreck. I’m saying either exciting or very very meh.

    • ViRGiN

      Valve? Exciting? At least you’re waking up a bit and not getting blindly optimistic anymore.

  • Tommy

    I have a pretty extensive Wishlist. It’s almost as long as the amount of VR games I have bought in other sales that I still haven’t played yet. Oh well, get em while they’re cheap. I have my whole life to play them. Really hoping we get a demo for Arashi and Undead Citadel too!

  • Andrew Jakobs

    I hope there will be many games on sale I still don’t have, and real sale, not 10-20% off. But I have a feeling my VR library won’t grow as much as I would like.

    Hell, who knows, maybe Valve will announce their new headset during that week.

  • Ryan McClelland

    Somehow, all I play is VR Chat and sometimes Blade and Sorcery. I play other games, but inside VRC. I’m hoping for a hardware announcement!

    • I purchased Blade and Sorcery on my Oculus account before I had an Index. It’s super wonky (unplayable) with Index from Oculus for some reason. If it goes on sale I will rebuy it from Steam. Combat physics were pretty awesome when I played it on Quest 2 with link.

    • It really takes a substantial product to make me turn my head when it comes to VR games. VRChat is VR to me; SocialVR more broadly. If I’m not with friends to meeting people, it’s not what I want out of VR right now.

      Maybe my tastes are an outlier, but I’m totally over the basics of VR. A reality with NPCs no better than what we have had for decades, or a reality with no NPCs, or a reality with limited interactions and physics all feel hollow and uninteresting. You can really see the illusion that is video game interaction when you are embodying the player character and immersing yourself in the game. Interacting with living breathing people and having experiences shared with them is far more interesting.

      • Tommy

        I’m the opposite. I prefer solo adventures. Others talking and messing around takes me out of tge immersion. I totally am glad you guys and many others enjoy the social part of VR. We need both

  • This is a cool endorsement for VR by Steam

  • Max-Dmg

    What does VR stand for?

    • Valve Republic

      • Max-Dmg

        So then, what’s an elf?

  • BananaBreadBoy

    Someone pointed out that the middle of the VR Fest week would mark 3 years, 3 weeks and 3 days since the Index release.

    It could be nothing. In fact it mostly is nothing. But it could be…something.

    • Calzvicsius

      Half Life 3 confirmed!

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Valve is currently still busy trying to fulfill first day Steam Deck orders from the preorder start on 2021-07-16. The batch from Monday finally got past the first 10h mark for the most popular model in the US, with the EU somewhat trailing behind that. Basically they are very far behind in a huge hardware launch with people now having waited for more than a year with no end in sight.

      The are also cranking out SteamOS updates like crazy, and so far have tested 4,000 out of 64,000 games for compatibility, with the goal of testing all of them. As pretty much the whole company seems to be heavily involved in this project and they are very far from anything resembling completion, I wouldn’t bet on significant development, production or support resources being available for another big hardware launch anytime soon, esp. since they hinted that AMD APUs will play a role with Deckard and the current generation isn’t fast enough. It seems more likely that any new Valve HMD will have to wait until both the Steam Deck project is progressed much further and AMD APUs based on RDNA 3 will become available.

      • XRC

        From conversation, steamdeck yes current focus, but VR development ongoing. friends and family still buying index, expect to use mine into 2023, maybe 2024.

        Electronics manufacturing constipated by component shortages, power cuts, shipping congestion. Risky planning…

        • ViRGiN

          “vr development ongoing” hahahahah

  • xyzs

    Is it just me or I see the same vr main games over and over for the past few years..?

    Never any new interesting hardware, never any new wow title since Alyx.

    They are lucky we are passionate, because many would have lost interest with such a dead activity…

    • ViRGiN

      No, it’s not just you. That’s why PCVR is fuking dead and no amount “but i’m still playing it” proves it different.

      Many have already lost interest in PCVR, because it’s not interesting. Rendering crappy games in higher resolution after investing heavily into hardware yields no profits. And in other news, water is wet.

      • ZeePee

        PSVR2 is about to begin a wave of AAA pc quality VR games that won’t ever end. These titles will come to PC too.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          We sort of expected the same with lots of ports of PSVR titles to PCVR or a rush of high quality titles after Valve demonstrated how to do it with Half-Life: Alyx. Didn’t happen. While I hope that you are right, the low user numbers of PCVR make any port a financial risk, so there is no guarantee that PSVR2 games will actually see PCVR versions. Especially if they rely on PS5 features like the fast SSD, on-the-fly texture compression or dynamic foveated rendering with eye tracking, as these would reduce the number of compatible PCVR systems even further.

        • ViRGiN

          No, it won’t. For fuk sake, why developers, after likely being sponsored by Sony to make it for PSVR2, would spend yet extra time and optimize and test fully in and out the game for thousands of different combinations, for dozens of headsets and a handful of different controllers? It literally makes no fuking sense, and sentences like yours are clear desperation hoping for pcvr to be relevant for the first time.

          • David Wilhelm

            Have you ever done any actual dev work? It’s quite common to take a game and release it on another platform for additional revenue. Stop trying so hard to make a point that isn’t true and serves no purpose.

          • ViRGiN

            yes i did. now tell me about all these PSVR developers who ported their game to PCVR.
            see, that never happened. these developers have self-respect and know the PCVR market way too well.

            stop getting mindlessly optimistic.

    • Jeremiah Tothenations

      There’s alot of interesting games coming to the PSVR2 and with how Sony are nowadays, those are bound to come to PCVR eventually. Valve also aren’t done with VR I’m sure.

      But yeah, shame on all of the AAA publishers that are waiting for VR to be massive before they take any kind of a risk, I won’t forget that.

      Red Matter 2, Moss 2 and Boneworks all look like great indie VR offerings though.

  • Jonathan Winters III

    VRfest, you would think, would be a bad title for what is only a sale on some VR games. Talk about overselling.

  • Max-Dmg

    Cut down a tree with a herring?

  • Ad

    This is pretty bad. Great to pick up a few games, although I’m not sure their new UI helps discovery much at all.

    • ViRGiN

      you should have had worshipped valve harder

  • gothicvillas

    Ok, just had a look on Steam page to see what all the fuas about.. yep, vr is dead sadly :/ tired to see the same titles again just different price tags. Where is your next big game, Valve?

    • Bryan Slygh

      They’ve added more demos I know undead citadel took a while for valve to confirm then there was an issue it’s up now tho. Not sure if any more demos are coming but many more are their then the first day. Undead citadel or samurai slaughterhouse vr are up now.

    • NL_VR

      Bonelab later this year will be GOTY 2022

      • ViRGiN

        GOTY of 2022 will still be rec room or beat saber

        • NL_VR

          Haha no.

  • ZeePee

    They definitely did not.

    Valve are slow. They’ve been developing a new headset (Deckard), and new VR games behind the scenes over the last few years.

  • Neon Engine

    Our car combat & racing game, Hyperwheel Overdrive, is 25% off for Steam VR Fest. Demo available later today!