By Valve's Steam Frame is now marked "coming soon" on the Steam backend, according to SteamDB. The company reiterated in its 2025 Year in Review that all three new hardware products, including Steam Frame, will ship this year. RAM and storage component shortages have complicated the timeline, but Valve's stated goal remains the first half of 2026.
That's the hardware news. Here's the more interesting question: when Steam Frame actually lands, what are people going to play on it?
The library problem nobody wants to talk about
Steam published its most-played PC VR games of 2025, and the list reads like a time capsule. The platinum tier is dominated by titles from 2016 to 2020: Beat Saber, Half-Life: Alyx, VRChat, Hot Dogs Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, Skyrim VR. Out of the entire top 50, exactly one game released in 2025 made the cut.
One.
The PCVR content library isn't dead, but it's running on fumes from half a decade ago. Modding communities are doing heroic work keeping Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, and Assetto Corsa feeling fresh. Gorilla Tag and Pavlov bring the multiplayer crowds. But where's the new stuff? Where are the titles that use six years of VR design knowledge to build something that couldn't exist on a monitor?
This is the real test for Steam Frame. Not whether the hardware works, because a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 16GB of RAM, dual 2160x2160 displays, and Wi-Fi 7 streaming is going to work fine. The test is whether having a new piece of Valve hardware catalyzes the content that PCVR has been starving for.
What Steam Frame actually brings to the table
The specs matter for one specific reason: Steam Frame is a "PC streaming first" device, according to Valve. It ships with a dedicated Wi-Fi 6E USB adapter for low-latency streaming from your PC, bypassing your local network entirely. But it also runs SteamOS natively on that Snapdragon chip, complete with Proton for Windows games and even an Android compatibility layer for Quest and Pico builds.
That dual identity is what makes this interesting from a content perspective. When you're tethered (wirelessly) to a gaming PC, you get the full PCVR library. Half-Life: Alyx at full fidelity. Modded Skyrim VR. Into the Radius 2. The stuff that actually justifies strapping a screen to your face.
But when you unplug from the PC, you're running on mobile silicon. And that's where Valve's Steam Frame Verified program gets ambitious. At GDC 2026, Valve revealed that standalone VR titles need to hit 90 FPS to earn the Verified label. That's stricter than Meta's Horizon Store or Pico's store, both of which allow 72Hz content. It's stricter than PlayStation VR2, which permits 60 FPS reprojected to 120Hz.
