The Steam Frame, a new VR headset Valve just announced alongside a new Steam Machine and Steam Controller, is both a simpler and more complex virtual reality kit than 2019’s Valve Index. While it lacks the Index’s fancy finger-tracking controllers, the hybrid headset can run Steam games straight from its own onboard storage, aided by controllers that adopt a more conventional gamepad (or Steam Deck)-style layout. The Frame’s goal, therefore, is to let its wearers play as many VR and non-VR games as possible – with its ARM-based Snapdragon chip posing both challenges and opportunities to spread that compatibility into Android VR games as well.
The tricky bit is that whereas Android games are built for ARM hardware, PC games are usually intended for the completely different x86 architecture – the kind powering your PC or Steam Deck right now. To find out more about the Frame’s (and by extension, SteamOS’s) ambitious platform crossover plans, I took a break from waving around its controllers in Valve’s offices last month and spoke to hardware/software engineer Jeremy Selan, designer Lawrence Yang, and hardware/acoustic engineer Joy Lyons. Question one: does all this mean Android games on Steam?
“We don’t have any concrete plans today,” Selan replied. “Our first toe in the water is with VR content, because the traditional way for mobile VR is to do that via the Android platform. So we’re going to allow people to publish those Android VR titles to Steam. But it’s certainly a new technology we’re really excited about.”
“It does open up a lot of possibilities” added Yang. “We’re really proud of all the work that folks did on Proton, but also on FEX.”
FEX may be a familiar name to Linux geeks: it’s an x86-to-ARM emulator that’s been in open development for years, with Valve a key sponsor. Now, just like how Valve’s Proton compatibility layer has been wrangling Windows games to run on the Linux-based Steam Deck, FEX is being baked into SteamOS too. As the Frame is a SteamOS device itself, it’ll be able to run made-for-PC games as well as Android VR fare.
“It’s kind of crazy that the actual version of Hades 2, which is made for a PC, is running on SteamOS, which it was not made for, but also running on ARM, which it was definitely not made for,” Yang said. “And because of FEX and Proton and the layers of all the things that we did, as a customer and a player you can just play these games and have access to way more games on this device without having to think about it.
“And [while] we’re nerding out and excited about all of these technical details, we just want the customer to see how many games they can play.”
“If we’ve done this right,” Selan continued, “they don’t actually have to think about any of this. They just bring up Steam, they see their catalogue, they hit play, and it just works.”
To be sure, my time playing Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong in the Frame’s 2D theatre mode didn’t throw up any indications that they were emulation jobs – again, much like the seamless way in which Proton gets Windows games running sweet as a nut on Linux. And while the range of Steam games that will run on the Frame’s own Snapdragon chip is still going to be restricted by its limited graphical horsepower, there is a certain, reassuring familiarity to putting on the Frame, seeing the same SteamOS interface you’ve clicked through a thousand times on the Steam Deck (or Steam’s Big Picture Mode), and launching the games that may have held pride of place in your library for years.
According to Yang, Valve will also be sending Steam Frame dev kits to makers of both VR and non-VR games, to help identify nascent compatibility issues: an identical strategy to the one employed before and after the Steam Deck’s public launch. It’s also another signal that Valve don’t see the Frame’s appeal so much in conventional hardware terms as they do in its library of standalone-compatible games. Likely thousands, given the size of the Steam catalogue, and surely far more than in Meta’s Quest store.
Such is Valve’s concentration on games that they’ve intentionally passed on making the Frame ready for mixed reality, the virtual/physical blending feature that Meta and Apple recently bet big on with their Quest 3 and Vision Pro headsets. That said, it can handle mixed reality with the right third-party hardware additions, with a 2 x 2.5Gbps expansion port allowing the requisite camera tech to be hooked up – and SteamOS isn’t likely to get in the way either.
“We did look into it,” Selan replied when I asked about mixed reality support. “With the front port, if people are enthusiastic about exploring that type of stuff, we certainly have the potential for this, but we have been very intentional about focusing on the core gaming experience. So I don’t want to say we’re not interested, but in terms of the priorities, we’ve put a huge amount of our engineering effort into the streaming, and we’ve put a huge of an engineering effort into locally playing your catalogue. Those are really the two pillars of what we’re aiming to achieve in this product.
“If there are other categories of games that, over time, become more widely exciting, we’d love for them to find a home on Steam, and then we’ll make them work. In the near term, especially at launch, the things we are truly focused on is just your Steam catalogue.”
“We should also say that, you know, this is a computer, and the end user, it’ll be their computer, and they can load whatever they want,” Lyons added. “This isn’t a closed ecosystem. So there is Desktop Mode, and you can load whatever software you want on this device to enable those experiences.”
“Absolutely the same as Steam Deck,” said Selans. “The same spirit.”
