Now that the Steam Frame is finally here, Valve’s entire hardware lineup is officially out in the wild. I got a chance to sit down with Valve software developers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Jeff Leinbaugh to talk about the new VR headset, and it sounds like the launch is only the beginning for the Steam Frame. Because while it is more expensive than something like the Meta Quest 3, Valve is hopeful that as an open platform, the Frame is going to be able to evolve over time, and who knows what it’s going to be capable of a couple years down the line.

IGN: Why not have the option to have a wired connection from the PC to the Steam Frame?

Jeff Leinbaugh: Yeah, so the goal for the Steam Frame was a wireless experience, really to get over a massive use case friction hump. We’ve been working on that for a long time. We’ve been shipping updates and supporting Steam Link for VR for a bunch of other headsets as we’ve worked on that technology. And then the dongle, the adapter was the next step for that, because as you know, wireless networking setups vary a lot. So the adapter’s a way to say, okay, this is the minimum bar, it’s in the box and is something that we can do a lot to ensure works pretty well.

So we see the Steam Frame as a streaming first headset, which for us, we think for the majority of people using it means a wireless streaming VR headset. We do have a [wired] mode that’s still restricted behind the developer toggle, but it’s something that’s being worked on with a USB cable, if you’ve got a long enough USB cable to the PC, that can be used to stream and it augments the existing wireless adapter or other connections with multilink the same way that all of them work together.

Pierre-Loup Griffais: In general our goal, our aim is for the wireless adapter to be sufficient and that you shouldn’t have to change your network configuration.

IGN: If the Steam Frame is designed to be streaming first, why not release a version with less RAM and a weaker chip to keep the price down, especially now that the RAM crisis has grown so bad?

Griffais: I think at this point, things were a little bit too far in development to fully rethink the product.

I would say that despite being streaming first, the ability to run things locally has been pretty well used in our observation and play testing, and I think there’s some potential there to improve the experience even further. And so I think we’re pretty happy with the trade-offs that we made along the way there to have both of those sides of the experience represented. And we expect that every user is going to approach it in a different way, where streaming might work best for a bunch of them, but standalone play would also work really well for some people.

Leinbaugh: Yeah, and that identity may evolve over time because we’re still in the early phases of getting compatibility verification and all of that going, just like we were in the very early days of the Steam Deck. So as the number of standalone certified titles grows, people may see this as less of a primary streaming headset, depending on what they want to do. Some people may be content with one kind of gameplay, one way of playing it, other people may come in from the other side. So we’re trying to improve all those angles.

IGN: Can you talk a little bit about the process of getting Proton compatibility running on ARM?

Griffais: Definitely. So the way that things run on the headset, Proton is the same exact Proton that you’re used to on Steam Deck and Steam Machine and other platforms, but it’s rebuilt natively for ARM instead. So all the Proton code is native for the platform. So as soon as the game exits the WIN 32 API environment and it’s on the ARM native side, there’s no performance hit from the ARM translation from that point on. So a lot of the code that powers the experience is actually Native ARM when you’re running a game through Proton. But to achieve the emulation on the x86 side of things, we’re using a program called FEX, which is a translation layer between x86 and ARM. We actually kicked off FEX development more than eight years ago at this point, thinking that it would be useful for things like that around this time.

So there’s been a lot of work that went into it and integrating into Proton, making it work for Linux native games and so on. But given all that, we’re at a point where compatibility is pretty much similar to what you’re used to on Steam Deck. And a lot of the games that work to the same extent just with the performance difference because the GPU architecture is a little bit different and the ARM translation incurs some different performance characteristics on the CPU as well.

I would say also there’s been a lot of work on the graphics driver side of things to make the driver able to run desktop-like games that are translated from DirectX 11, DirectX 12, as typically the drivers on those mobile chip sets, that’s not their primary aim. But thanks to the open source nature of the drivers on Linux and Mesa, we’ve been able to do a ton of first party work there and improve it greatly.

IGN: Back when I visited in November, Valve was iffy on whether or not the Frame would be able to run Half-Life: Alyx natively, and now it works great. Do you think that performance is going to improve further as drivers mature?

Griffais: I think for Alyx specifically, if any work is left there on the performance side, it’s going to be on the application side to make some final tweaks. But as we go doing that, we sometimes do new features in the driver or tweaks in the driver to accommodate that. But at this point, I think a lot of the performance has been tapped into, but it’s possible we might discover some new untapped way of optimizing things further. There’s been a ton of work that’s been happening in tandem between the people working on Half-Life: Alyx optimization for the Frame and the driver, and a lot of those learnings actually will help other games, as well as help people tweak their games to run natively on Frame.

Leinbaugh: Yeah, going through the process of making Alyx run standalone is also helping us figure out the new problem of, “How do we make sure that VR games running standalone are a good experience?” Because we now are pretty good at getting non-VR games to run through Proton and making sure that those are verified and being comfortable with what those thresholds are.

For VR, it’s kind of a different story because comfort is a bigger factor. So as we’ve gone through the process of making Alyx run better, we’re learning about what’s important when we look at other VR games to make sure that we can guarantee this is a good experience without setting a bar that’s just unreasonably high, but something that’s really useful to people who are using that as a tool to figure out what they should play. And one goal we have is, if we can lower the requirements on a game because we have driver improvements, re-projection improvements, that we’re confident we’ll still make that a good experience, then that’s something that we would do as well once the technology for that is improved. We’re pretty confident having a game like Alyx to test a lot of that stuff against has been really useful too.

IGN: Coming in at $1,059 makes sense in the current hardware landscape, but the elephant in the room is the Meta Quest 3 at around half the price. What sets the Steam Frame apart from Meta’s headsets?

Griffais: I think there’s a bunch of different facets there. I mean, in practice, generally when we think about our products and what we want to bring to the table, we’re not really directly comparing it to any other platform. We’re trying to make choices that we think make sense for Steam users and will improve their experience playing a bunch of games. But for sure, I think our users, there’s probably a bunch of use cases around modding and installing third party apps and things that we think Frame will work pretty well with.

And we’re also very happy with the comfort, the weight of it, and the quality of the optics that you get for that. But as far as the price goes, I think it’s a direct representation of the hardware that’s in there, and there’s not a lot of work that we’re doing to try and muddy the picture there.

We’re just building it for the cost that the parts in there cost us, and then passing that on to users as we’re doing with other hardware.

IGN: When the Steam Frame was first revealed, we heard that Valve was trying to keep the price under the Index. How much has the RAM crisis moved up the price over what it theoretically was back then?

Griffais: Yeah, if you look at other comparable products like the Steam Deck or Steam Machine and what we were looking for originally and where it landed, it’s kind of a similar price difference. It’s really a reflection of the price changes in the market as a whole and the conditions around both things like, of course, memory and storage costs, but also even things like the main board cost, the layers of the main board itself, the copper, shipping… Everything is more expensive than it was this time last year. So all of that stuff comes into play there.

IGN: How much have the higher prices this year affected the demand for products like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine? How well did the Steam Machine sell?

Griffais: It’s a little hard to say because we’re still working on getting the whole launch quantity through, but in practice, I mean I think price for sure impacts demand. We’ll have to monitor how things are going, but we’re pretty comfortable with the fact that all these products are trending similarly to other products in the market. So for something, the Frame or a Steam Deck, of course, the value is a little bit harder to pinpoint compared to other PCs in the market because they have different aspects that they’re bringing to play. The Deck’s portable platform, the Frame being the virtual reality form factor with the optics and a few things that are not really represented in the larger PC market.

But if you look at the memory and anything that has a similar amount of memory, it’s kind of trending the same direction and Steam Machine is not really getting more expensive than a comparable PC. They’re kind of evolving at the same spot in the same market, and I think the same will apply to the Frame as well.

IGN: Has the current hardware shortage impacted the way Valve is thinking about actually putting a Steam Deck 2 into development?

Griffais: Not really. I think the same way that we’re working back from the user experience and what we’re bringing to the table in terms of the same things that we’ve talked about before about how we want to make sure there’s a very delineated performance improvement for something like a future Steam Deck, I think we’re still looking at it in the same way.

It’s just a matter of looking at the current conditions and seeing how and when we can deliver something like that. But from what we’re working on as far as the user experience goes and what the product that we’re trying to build goes, it’s very similar goals.

IGN: The Valve Index launched with Half-Life: Alyx. Why launch the Steam Frame, especially at its price, without any new game?

Leinbaugh: Yeah, a huge part of our focus with this, because we were bringing our VR product line into SteamOS and Proton and game compatibility and everything that brings, we really prioritized getting software compatibility in a good state so that there would be a huge number of games, I mean as big as possible, available to play on the device or stream to the device on day one. And that’s kind of the maximum value proposition that we saw with this, that you’ve got a lot of games to play and a lot of options of what games to play, even if they’re VR games or not VR games. And so that’s kind of what we’re bringing to the launch.

IGN: When using the Steam Frame, I noticed that the default light seal wasn’t great, but the one included in the Ergonomic Accessories Kit was so much better. Why not include the larger light seal with the Steam Frame?

Griffais: I think the thing you just said about it having a real cost that’s tangible I think is part of the picture there, because some of these accessories are not going to be used by everyone. So we wanted to make sure that we didn’t burden the cost of the base offering for folks that didn’t immediately need the different shape accessories for the face gaskets and things like the hand drops if they’re not playing with that. So it’s really a factor of trying to reduce it to the strict minimum that we saw most people would have a good experience with, and then for folks that need more to have it available separately.

IGN: I love how lightweight and comfortable the Steam Frame is, but the battery life isn’t very long. Are there any plans to sell an extra battery pack or any battery accessories?

Leinbaugh: No specific plans to talk about, but we’ve been thinking a lot about battery life. We thought a lot about the battery when we were deciding what to ship with the product, because like you said, weight is a big factor, and the bigger the battery is, the more you trade off a lot of other aspects of the experience.

So what we aimed for was something that was pretty balanced that would get you one to two hours of gameplay. And then we also have included some knobs to let people tweak that if they want to try to extend the battery life a little further, or if they’re near a power source and they want to go full out and use the battery up faster, that’s also an option. As far as charging, a lot of off-the-shelf battery banks and things, anything that does USB power delivery, 45 watts is a good target.

I think you can actually charge it faster than it’ll drain if you go down to 20-ish watts, but it’ll support 45 watts and that’ll charge up really quickly from a battery bank or from a wall charger. But beyond that, we’ve been looking into what we could bring in the future as an alternate option for the strap because we designed the core and the strap modularly.

Everything that’s in the strap, the audio, the strap itself, and the battery are things that potentially could be replaced in the future. One of those things that we’re looking at is a potential strap that would offer a larger battery or hot swappable battery solution so that we could maybe deliver a first party version of something like that. At the same time, we’re looking at alternate audio solutions, which all came up during the development of the product, but kind of like with the battery, they were not a good fit for the kind of baseline lightweight experience we thought would be most valuable to most people.

So we’re also looking at what it would take to do an Index-style off-ear audio solution, and so we’re kind of excited about exploring that and seeing if we can make something like that.

IGN: Do you envision third party manufacturers coming up with their own accessories to augment the Steam Frame with?

Leinbaugh: Yeah, we hope so. We have one partner already for the front port with the RGB cameras. And yeah, the port is good for more than just that potentially, so it really depends what people want to try, and yeah, we’re excited about it.

IGN: How is Nvidia driver support coming along on SteamOS?

Griffais: Yeah, we’re working on it hard. It’s definitely at the top of our list. It’s one of those things just like FEX and working on the Qualcomm driver, it just takes years. And so we’ve been at it for a few years already. The team is growing. We’ve done a few things like we’ve enabled the driver now in the main tree of SteamOS, so you can get things to light up on certain generations, but in terms of the performance difference between that driver and where the state of the art is, there’s definitely still a little bit of a rift that we’re trying to work on, but it’s getting better day-to-day, so we’re really hoping that at some point we can recommend it to users running that hardware, but right now it’s still work in progress.

IGN: I’ve been using the Frame to stream 2D games a lot, how do y’all use it? Are you more VR focused or do you spend more time playing 2D games on a private screen?

Leinbaugh: I’ve gone back and forth a lot. I think the thing that I like to do has changed depending on what I’m playing. I went a couple months where I was mostly just playing local 2D content on the headset, and I was working on that a lot, and so I was playtesting it a lot, and basically that was the primary way I used it. But yeah, I’ll notice something that I want to play in VR on PC, and then I’ll get into a mode where I’m going home every night and streaming a Sim game or something in VR. Yeah, I don’t think I have a consistent answer that would remain true for more than two to four weeks over the last year with how I’ve been using it. I know a lot of people in the team are different.

Some people have rarely used it to play VR games. Some people only use it as a VR headset playing with their PC and haven’t done anything else. We don’t want to tell people how to use it, because people even on the team have found value in these little corners of what it can do. So our goal has just been to pick a game and play it, and hopefully you don’t have to think too hard about how you’re getting into it or what’s happening to put the game in front of you, but just to support all of those things, because we’ve seen how valuable it is to approach it from all those angles.

Griffais: Yeah, lately I’ve been playing Metal Gear Solid 4 on it and locally it runs really well. But the fact that I can have it, like you said, in the giant theater and also have a chat window open on the side or something is interesting and opens a lot of different possibilities. Personally, I really enjoy the fact that I can recline on my chair and leave my arms by my side while I’m playing a game like that instead of engaging my shoulders and always gripping a [standard] controller like that, so it’s a little bit more relaxing.

But beyond that, when I was playing, I recently did a new play through Alyx because I was helping test and tweak the game there leading up to launch, and I found myself alternating between streaming and local. So I was streaming when no one was on the Machine because I could just use it for streaming, but then when someone was playing on there or someone was watching TV or something, I would just do a span of it playing locally, and being able to flip back and forth there was very valuable.

IGN: Speaking of the Machine, when will support for streaming to the Steam Frame from the Steam Machine be officially supported?

Griffais: I think we have a specific timeline. The core elements are all there in terms of getting the actual link up and running and all that. It’s really things around the user experience and setting up the wireless adapter and all that that are still a work in progress. So in terms of the core experience, if you know how to set things up right now, you can get into it and get to the actual streaming and have no problems there, but it’s not in a state where we would really recommend people do that because there’s a set of paper cuts on the way in and out of that experience. So we’re really hoping we can improve that around launch.

IGN: I was surprised by how much 2D streaming to the Frame changed the way I played games. What are some future possibilities you’re excited to see from the Steam Frame?

Griffais: I think beyond, I mean, it’s kind of a tangent, but I’m personally also excited to see how people improve the experience beyond just 2D streaming, because there’s some opportunities for augmenting 2D streaming in a way that I don’t really do with a flat screen. At some point, there was an industry push for stereo displays, 3D vision and a lot of things like that, but all those games I think would actually work pretty well streamed to a headset because you could have that effect because the display is stereo capable in that context. And so I’m really looking forward to seeing if people do more with that, because the idea that you could actually augment your game by streaming it in a way like that and not just merely have a big screen is pretty fascinating to me.

IGN: What do you mean by augment?

Griffais: Well, just if a game used to have stereo support, you could actually enable that 3D effect on a flat game, and I think that’s pretty untapped at this point.

Leinbaugh: Yeah, and we’ve seen VR mod conversions before – that’s not a new thing, but it’s interesting when you have a device that can play a game anywhere along that spectrum from a flat screen game playing in a rectangle in a theater view all the way up to a full immersive VR with motion controls. Any kind of feature-add along that spectrum is something that you could test and try, and there might be value there when it makes really no difference that you just load it up and you may get stereo separation or depth or something. Those are all kinds of interesting options.

Griffais: A game developer could just do a minimal kind of addition, which is just putting their HUD out of the game when you’re playing on a streaming setup like that or something equally light touch, but actually would change the experience quite a bit when you’re on Frame.

IGN: It sounds like there are all kinds of possibilities on how the Steam Frame could evolve in the future. Do you see the Steam Frame as a fully-fleshed-out device or an early-adopter kind of product, where people should get it to look forward to future updates?

Leinbaugh: I mean, neither. Somewhere in the middle. We like getting excited about future possibilities for sure, and a lot of people do too, but that’s not something you have to get excited about to go out and use Steam Frame. When we decided to make this and ship it, we did that because this was something that you could play your game library with and have fun with, and there’s value there now. So I don’t think it requires some assumption that you’re investing in a future update or future tech.

And that’s good for us because we can deliver something that we’re confident that has a value and people will like now. But then we also get to watch what people like about it and read feedback for what people don’t like. And then that can drive us to do those future updates that we’re already excited about working on.

Griffais: I think a lot of those cool elements will actually come from the community as well. And I’m super excited to see what people do with that. It’s kind of a canvas that’s differently shaped than anything else that’s been done before in terms of open platforms, like the possibilities that you can have to extend a Linux desktop into VR, or mod games into VR and into those hybrid things that we just discussed. There’s a ton of possibilities there and we’re super excited to see what people do with it. But I do think it’s a pretty fully formed offering as is. You don’t need any of that. You have access to your whole Steam library, you have the streaming core experience, you have local VR, all that stuff that you’re talking about is there at launch. So I think there’s not really an expectation that there’s a missing piece that someone will fill in later.