After months of leaks and rumors, it's official: Valve has announced the price and availability of its standalone VR headset, the Steam Frame. And yes, it's anything but cheap.
What Does the Steam Frame Cost and What's Included?
The 256GB version starts at $1,059 (approximately €1,049 or £889), while the 1TB version costs $1,299. The price includes controllers, a wireless adapter for PC streaming – and, to the delight of many, a copy of Half-Life: Alyx. Under the hood, it packs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, 16 GB RAM, SteamOS 3, and two LCD displays, each with 2,160 x 2,160 pixels and a refresh rate of up to 144 Hz.
How Can You Get a Device This Year?
Anyone hoping to get one of the headsets in 2026 will need to participate in a reservation lottery: Registration is already open, and those who enter by September 17th, 10 AM Pacific Time, have the best chances. Confirmation emails for successful reservations are expected to be sent out starting September 18th. Those who miss the deadline will likely face wait times extending well into 2027 – which has become almost standard for highly sought-after VR hardware.
How Good Is the Steam Frame According to Initial Reviews?
Initial independent reviews are largely positive: Comfort and the quality of PC streaming are particularly praised, with several publications stating it's significantly superior to what's been seen from previous standalone VR headsets. In contrast, the high price is universally criticized – and this is where it gets interesting.
Valve itself openly justifies the costs with the current “RAM crisis”: Memory chips have become scarce and expensive due to high global demand from AI data centers, which has driven up prices not only for VR headsets but also for graphics cards and complete PCs. For buyers, this means: Those hoping for falling prices through later hardware revisions might be disappointed as long as the memory chip situation doesn't change. From our perspective, the Alyx bundle at least makes the entry price somewhat more palatable, but it doesn't change the fundamental criticism of the price.
Even before the official announcement, we had reported on a rumor about the Half-Life: Alyx bundle – now it's confirmed that there was indeed truth to it.
Will you sign up for the reservation lottery, or is the Steam Frame too expensive for you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
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