Valve: We Still Believe in VR, But Content is Still ‘Chicken-and-Egg’ Dilemma

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It’s not very often we get insight into Valve’s thought process, as the company tends to let actions speak for themselves. But at a ‘Steam Indie Connect’ event in Korea, the company says it still believes in VR, and outlined some of the challenges ahead.

The News

As reported by Korean tech outlet Inven, Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson from Valve’s Steam business team mostly spoke to the small crowd of eventgoers about AI, and how the company has acknowledged the influx of low-effort, AI-driven content on Steam and how developers can navigate the changing landscape. You can read the full report in English here.

Giardino, who has been with Steam’s business team since 2012, also fielded questions from VR developers, who wanted to know what the company is doing about curation, visibility, and policies for VR games, given the company has just releases its first standalone VR headset, Steam Frame.

Note: The information in this article, including direct quotes, are machine translated from Korean. No video of the event appears to be available at this time, however we’ll update when/if that changes.

There doesn’t appear to be many concrete answers to those questions, although one such developer echoed anxiety among VR fans that Valve might be abandoning VR.

“We still believe in virtual reality,” Giardino said. That said, Giardino noted Steam Frame users are mostly now playing standard flatscreen games rather than VR titles.

One of VR’s biggest challenges is a ‘chicken-and-egg’ dilemma, Giardino said: developers wait for the VR market to expand, while players wait for more VR games. Meanwhile, flatscreen games continue to grow more diverse and compelling, making it more difficult to justify making VR games. That, and expensive, popular flatscreen games launch every week, which is the biggest hurdle facing VR developers, Giardino said.

Valve sees Steam Frame as just one piece of the VR ecosystem; the company has put significant effort into the Steam Link app for Meta Quest, as well as support for the OpenXR standard so users of any headset can play games via SteamVR.

The component crisis is still a factor though, Giardino said, noting that rising prices for RAM and memory ultimately led to Steam Frame being more expensive than the company initially hoped. This, in turn, made it less attractive to new users.

“Moments where we could have welcomed many new customers became reasons to hesitate or wait on VR,” he said, adding, “We feel sorry to VR developers.”

My Take

As many have speculated, it seems Valve is hoping to sustain the VR market by framing Steam Frame as a non-VR device, which just so happens to be able to play VR games.

Ostensibly, the hope is if enough people buy Steam Frame, or standalone SteamVR-supported devices like it in the future, then is may seem more prudent for developers to target VR headsets, since the install base will naturally be much higher than if the device were solely aimed at VR fans.

It’s a strategy I hope pays off, although Frame may have a much harder time than Steam Deck in kicking off a new class of SteamOS-supported hardware. As long as component prices stay high, and newcomers decide to wait as a result, that chicken-and-egg problem will persist—worsened by the fact that Meta stopped the VR funding “gravy train” earlier this year and also hasn’t committed to continuing the usual cadence of generational updates to Quest.

That said, Valve isn’t making it any easier on the content side. The company developed Half-Life: Alyx (2020), which is still one of the best AAA VR games out there, released shortly after its PC VR headset, Valve Index. And although we got a standalone version of HLA with Frame last month, it’s not doing very much for people who’ve already played, and want something else equally compelling to go along with their new Steam Frame.

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