No prices yet. I may never financially recover from this.
I posted this in the other thread, but wanna share here too:
Most interesting thing to me is the Frame apparently runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and is using SteamOS, implying official ARM support for SteamOS, Steam and Proton! Could mean steam and proton coming to android too.
And the base would be Arch Linux ARM, right? So that should see an uptick in development too.
I’m still a little curious how that will work for games. Are they going to somehow emulate Win32 amd64 games? Do devs have to recompile them in some new way? Will engines support it beyond Unity and Unreal?
It was mentioned in the LTT coverage. Aside from native ARM games they have a translation layer(FEX) to play x86 games on ARM. They’ll have a “Verified” tag like the Steam Deck for compatibility. I assume you’ll still be able to force trying to run unverified games.
Edit: FEX is not a Valve thing, but an existing open source x86/x86_64 emulator that Valve is using. It’s not clear if they’re forking it or directly contributing though.
That same video says that “Valve has heavily contributed to FEX”
Well, that shows how well I was paying attention to the video
Yup, FEX to translate x86 to ARM.
The Frame isn’t playing the games on its ARM chip. It’s just streaming audio/visual data from the PC and relaying the controller inputs back to the PC.
Jeff Geerling is probably having a fit right now.
It is fascinating and a huge step, but I want to keep expectations low. It will work, but it will not be as compatible as x86 Proton, not at all. It is first and primarily an OS for streaming games and running VR. That is the VR rendering from the streaming computer, not the VR game itself. In other words, they only had to get exactly one app to run well enough for public use. According to the developer, it is working with a surprising amount of games. I agree, one game is surprising, but trust me when I say you will not be running Windows x86 games in ARM Linux for a long time.
Steam/Proton on android would be quite something, I would finally be able to play something decent on my phone that wasn’t originally released for the PS2
Only one company has apparently learned how to print money and not be ghouls.
To be fair, they say they made a lot of tradeoffs in the name of being price conscious, but they haven’t put a price on it yet.
I’d say it’s priceless.
conscious*
Thank you. Didn’t notice I screwed that up.
Sometimes I think about how LOATHED Steam was when it launched. That was probably valid even. Still, it feels worth noting that Valve is maybe THE only company from my childhood that feels like it largely stayed true to its spirit, or whatever.
People who came to Steam later on probably don’t realise that when it was new it barely fucking worked.
Downloads crawled, games refused to launch because of authentication issues, friends/chat was offline for literally months, etc.
The only reason it became widely adopted was because Valve forced you to use it if you wanted to play the latest CS or, later, HL2. Everyone hated it.
What if he really wanted to make it up to you? Is there anything he could do to apologize?
HALF. LIFE. FUCKING. THREE.
Exactly. How tf do you propose to get it if you digest him? You’ve hit on the crux of the issue here.
Yeah he could hand over a couple billion dollars, that would make up for it.
friends/chat was offline for literally months
Friends lists didn’t work reliably for years.
This is true but this was also done at at time when all of these things were unprecedented. Valve was blazing a trail with Steam and digital distribution and there was nothing else even close.
It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.
I was one of the haters when it first launched because I was on dialup at the time and physical discs I bought were forcing me to install steam AND THEN install a massive patch that did not work on dialup. My first day playthrough of Skyrim was ruined because of that. Took a week for that shit to download even though I went physically to a store.
But now Steam is the last man standing between us and corporate greed.
But now Steam is the last man standing between us and corporate greed.
Man how quickly people forget what things were like before the lawsuits forced valve to make steam more consumer friendly and regulatory abiding…
When was that?
I remember being annoyed that I had to install yet another launcher and make yet another account when I was installing portal. But I didn’t know at the time that this was the launcher to end most other launchers and accounts, or at the very least made most of that transparent other then adding an extra click to launch some games.
Iirc, Blizzard had just replaced the wow in-game patcher with a launcher (though I don’t recall if they had a unified launcher for each game, if they all had their own at that point, or if it was just wow), Oblivion had a game launcher, and I think there were a few others. Some of them even needed to be installed separately iirc.
Steam is nice because, being the launcher for most of my games, it’s just always open and helps organize my games. And it doesn’t feel like its main purpose is to make money, with everything else just being about opening pathways to that money. And even though it is meant to make Valve money, it’s the lack of blatant dark patterns and constant upsell attempts that makes it feel better than most of the rest of the commercial world.
They have good PR and fanboy propaganda. They’re every bit as evil as every game company out there. Steam fans just got tricked into thinking Gabe was THEIR billionaire and steam is THEIR billionaire corporation, and they can do no wrong. No other game platform has a fan base as aggressive and hostile when you point it ou
Edit: im being downvoted, sent IM threats and have had my comments on here removed by mods, if that’s not proof of what I was saying I don’t know what is lol
Why does everyone here Yuck other peoples Yum? You aren’t forced to buy them
The irony of this being your previous comment
Edit: Since parent is editing - his reply called me a cocksucker, hence the mod removal. Yay for blatant homophobia
Removed by mod
The downvotes seem to agree with you…?
Steam’s main thing is that they have recognised that killing the golden goose is a bad thing for everybody. They have consistently played for long term growth and profits, over purely short term gains.
Steam has made mistakes, but their demonstrated values have been shown to be mostly compatible with mine. I can work with that.
Also, them being privately owned means that they are less have seagull investors swooping in and demanding short term gains now now now.
I just paid $20 for a physical copy Counter Strike, and I find out I need to install an additional launcher and make an account to play the game I just installed. It’s the principle of the thing!
It basically didn’t add any value to the experience. We just wanted to play CS, and steam just got in the way.
It happened to me (with blizzard)…and it will happen to you!
A lot of companies turned to utter shit over the years but Blizzard hit me the hardest I think.
If Valve went DRM free like GOG, I would have no reason to ever buy games anywhere else
(apart from exclusives, which should be illegal IMO)
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because most people got exposed to steam’s launch on HL2’s launch. Where they bought the physical game, came home, installed it off like 5 CDs… then had to run steam to decrypt it and download more files because the fucking install was encrypted, and the goddamn fucking decryption took like 8 hours if you didnt have the worlds greatest computer.
Nope, I’m still totally not salty about not being able to play the game I fucking bought until the day after cause bullshit encryption fuckery, why would you ever think that.
I still have that goddamn box somewhere… i need to dig it up and see what release retail HL2 is like compared to HL2 you’d downlaod today from steam…
Well, I bought Half-Life and OG You Don’t Know Jack on discs at Target, then had to return them because HL didn’t run and YDKJ was “too worldly.” So.
Hello, Veteran Steam User (made my account the day steam released, I was big into the half life/cs/tfc scene back in the day), steam was HORRIBLE when it released. I had a cable modem way back then and it was incredibly slow. Only the ugly green theme, and crashed all the time. It was only used as DRM, not as a way to catalogue games. I clung to those WAN servers up until Valve no longer supported them, it was a sad day at the time.
I still remember the pissed-off memes, novel-long outrage threads, etc.!
Did Valve just announce THREE of something?
Holy shit you’re right.
Been waiting for a competitor to the meta quest. Looks like my patience has paid off. I hope it’s not too pricey/compromised
“The Frame headset won’t be priced higher than the Index”:
Yes but which index ? The headset alone is 540€, but the full VR Kit is 1080€
Dont get me wrong, I’m still going TK buy it if it costs 1080€, but I will be annoyed, and very sad for all the kids who will still have to sell their soul to Meta for a while…
I really hope it’s ~500€
Should have waited instead of buying the Pico.
Valve remains committed to an open PC ecosystem
happy noises
A brief moment of KDE desktop shown.
2026 will be the year of Linux Desktop!
Linux Desktop!Linux… facetop?
Linux! It’s in your FACE!!!
I hope they release an official Steam OS for desktop. Maybe a little Nvidia support.
The controller is exactly what I wanted. Take a Steam Deck, cut out the middle, glue the grips back together. Take my money.
Steam Dk
When I look at this announcement, the hardware is very exciting, for sure. But it is Valve’s dedication to Linux that really has me smiling. I don’t see three hardware devices to buy. I see two big proclamations for which the hardware is the message:
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SteamOS on desktop! It seemed inevitable but it’s still great to see.
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STEAM VR USING LINUX AS ITS TARGET PLATFORM?!?!?
I will grant that it’s very possible I buy all three pieces of the hardware, even though I like building my own PCs. I will also grant that Valve’s support for linux probably would not be what it is without the enshittification of Microsoft’s ecosystem. But in this world I’m gonna go ahead and accept the imperfect good news.
They’ve been pretty great on Linux. They built on the great work of the wine people and have done a lot to push the state forward.
I believe they’ve had a lot of good things to say about the stability of the Linux platform from a development perspective. For all the jank and instability that Linux software exposes, it has a lot more stability in terms of things like kernel and driver interfaces as a point of deliberate design choice. So there’s a lot less work needing to code around the specific versions of drivers being used.
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Where’s my Steam Phone Gabe ?
It’s coming right after the GabeCube
With GameHub lite you can run steam games on high end android phones right now. GameHub lite is based on the work valve has been doing to get games running on ARM. I won’t be surprised if valve announces official steam for android in the next few years. (Steam for android as in an app that can run your games not just browsing the store).
Don’t android me, I want KDE plasma steam phone dude.
Introducing: The GnomePhone
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If there was one organization with the motive and resources to help develop an open phone hardware platform, Valve sure seems like a good contender.
C’mon Gabe, make a name for yourself in computer history. Secure a place in the history books next to Torvalds and Stallman rather than Gates/Jobs/Zuck types.
Make “steam compatible phone” become the new “IBM compatible PC”!
Oh boy Unreal Engine 5 titles at 0.1 fps instead of 10
Finally! I’ve been holding out for years waiting on steam to release a new VR set, time to finally get one!
why is this thing not called Steam Engine?
I agree. FWIW, unofficially, fans are already calling it the “GabeCube” which is no less punny.
Apparently it’s likely smaller than the GameCube was which is pretty incredible.
I’m assuming that d brand are already working on a GameCube inspired skin for this.
They are and have shown it
Really excited for this and hopefully that means steamvr on Linux will actually start working better! The current Beta build is much better but still lots of work to do.
I’m definitely getting the frame as upgrade from quest 3 which I rarely use due to it being attached to Meta. The controller is no brainer considering that old steamdeck controller is still one of the best controllers on the market. Not sure about steam machine mostly because I just built my own PC - would have totally waited for it if I knew it was coming but it looks so slick.
Very excited for Linux in 2026!
Hmm this makes me wonder if the Steam Deck 2 will be ARM. If the Steam Frame works well, that could be a way for Valve to push more performance/battery life out of the deck
If they shared the same processing unit it could also cut their costs down.
Lets fucking go! This lineup looks sick.
