Image: Valve

It is no secret that I like VR games. I've been singing the praises of my fancy cyber-goggles (the Chinese-made Pico 4, specifically) for some time. VR gaming fills the gap in my life where light-guns and other funny console peripherals used to live. The tactile, the weird, the experimental. And so I should be celebrating now that Valve have officially unveiled and opened pre-orders for the Steam Frame, their powerful PC-based headset. It's designed for wireless streaming but with on-board hardware beefy enough to run a native port of the excellent but ageing Half-Life: Alyx. So, why do I mostly feel anxious?

For starters, the price. £889 is a LOT, and the 1TB version for £1,089 is eye-watering, and this is before you get any add-ons or accessories. While the Steam Frame does look like a good piece of kit, it's also not THAT much more powerful than a Quest 3. A headset that goes for £400, with the more consumer-priced Quest 3S hovering around he £300 mark, with sales often pushing it into the £250 bracket. Much as I love VR gaming, I'd never recommend someone rush out to pay over £400 for a niche peripheral, no matter how many games are in circulation.

There are a huge number of VR games. Thousands, even. More than the exclusives for all current-gen consoles combined, plus the previous generation before that, most likely. But right now, there aren't many high-profile titles coming out. I cannot wait for Gunman Contracts to leave early access, and I'm extremely hyped for Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2, and have a good chunk more on my wishlist, but the gold rush era is over, and that's in large part because game development is no longer being subsidized to any reasonable degree.

It feels like a cruel joke that on the Steam Frame's official preorder page, they've got Moss: Book 2 prominently featured in one of their animated showcases of how many games are available. Moss developers Polyarc just announced, two days ago, that they are shutting down after their final Hail Mary - a non-VR port. And they're far from the only VR developer in dire straits. With Oculus/Meta/Facebook having grown tired of the Metaverse (a concept far better served by independent platforms like VRChat), funding has dried up for developers. They want to keep making hardware, but with nobody around to make software, how long can this ship keep sailing?

I do not think that VR will ever disappear. There are multiple hardware manufacturers and dozens of models available, either being actively sold or circulated second-hand. But unless there is a serious injection of funding into VR game development soon, this is going to remain the stomping grounds of hobbyists, tinkerers, technologist dreamers, weirdos, and horny furries. And while that's not a terrible crowd to roll with, all told, it's unlikely that we'll see anything on the scale of Half-Life Alyx anytime soon, unless something big changes.

This is all the more maddening because VR hardware is finally where it should be. The Pico 4 and Quest 3 are great machines that allow you to play native lower-spec games, or connect seamlessly and wirelessly to PC to experience high-end stuff without tripping over any cables. The Steam Frame is specifically built to connect to Steam on PC for that full-fat (or fat-burning, as the case might be) remote experience. Yes, people will be able to experience the glory that is heavily-modded Beat Saber, but what comes after? Will there even BE an After?

Pre-order signups are available now for the Steam Frame, starting at $1059/$889, with a significantly more costly 1TB version. I can only hope that Valve has plans or more to unveil beyond 'If we build it, they will come'. For their sake, my own, and for VR as an entire medium.