If you're like me, you were silently hoping for a new homemade VR game from Valve to launch alongside the new Steam Frame. Unfortunately, that was wishful thinking, but bundled with the new headset is the company's hit from 2020, Half-Life: Alyx. That's hardly a bad thing, since the game has been long-touted as one of the best VR games ever made, but when the best VR headsets don't launch often, it'd be easy to hope for a successor.
"We decided to focus on just making sure the Steam catalogue as a whole would be a good experience, and trying to put most of our efforts into that compatibility," said Pierre-Loup Griffais, a SteamOS developer in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun.
"Because there's a tonne of existing experiences I think that can intro you to whatever side of the devices you're more interested in, right?" Essentially, Valve was concentrating more on the challenges of getting Steam games to run natively in the headset's standalone mode, particularly when the aims of the new hardware were to give people a Steam Deck-like experience of being able to take their non-VR games on the go with them as well as fully immersive ones.
"I can't speak for everyone here," continued Griffais, "but if I'm showing the headset to someone, something like SuperHot VR or Beat Saber or one of those OG titles is gonna get on there, because they're still so good, right?"
Of course, the main challenge Valve would have faced was getting a demanding game like Half-Life: Alyx to run natively on its headset, particularly when it was designed for high-end, wired VR headsets to make the most of it, not standalone devices with smaller processors, or, god forbid, ARM processors.
The development of games to run on ARM processors could be a common theme we hear more about in the coming years since more smaller form-factor devices will house them. Nvidia is currently working on gaming performance for its RTX Spark processor, and there's a whole swathe of compatibility issues the company is working through when it comes to support that goes past emulation, not to mention anti-cheat, DirectX, and Vulkan, which I've been told first-hand at demos have been complicating things. It seems from this interview with RPS that Valve experienced similar speed bumps.
For context, ARM processors use a different architecture and run very differently from the typical ones we see in gaming desktops, laptops, and traditional PCs. With that in mind, it takes a lot more know-how to convert existing games and apps to work on them since they're often built to work on more traditional chips. The reason we're seeing more ARM processors these days is that they prioritize efficiency and less heat generation, making them perfect for today's modern, sleek, and often lighter hardware that still wants to be as powerful as we expect it to be.
Half-Life: Alyx would obviously be playable with the Steam Frame at launch anyway if you were streaming it directly from your gaming PC or laptop, but along with the launch of its new headset, Valve has updated the game to run in the Frame's standalone mode.
"All the fixes we got in for Alyx," said Robin Walker, a programmer at Valve and one of the co-creators of Team Fortress 2, in the same interview with RPS, "the vast majority of them are applicable to basically anything that's running on the Frame."
Does this point to a new VR game from Valve coming in the future when there's more compatibility secured for existing games? Or will new games in development need to make compromises to secure verification for the headset? It all remains to be seen. As more and more VR headsets focus on wireless convenience over lossless GPU connections, we may see less demanding VR titles launching, but thanks to streaming from PCs being more efficient these days, it's unlikely that they all have to compromise on performance as a result.
Even as the "verified for Steam Frame" catalog continues to grow, I would be surprised if we see a new VR game from Valve anytime soon, but just like with an eventual Half-Life 3, we can all hope, right?
For more on VR, take a look at the best Meta Quest accessories.
