Valve admits Steam Frame was meant to cost less — RAM prices got in the way
Valve developers say the new Steam Frame VR headset was originally targeted at a lower price than its $1,059 launch cost, but a squeeze in the global RAM and storage markets pushed it up. The company says it fought to keep the price close to component cost.
Valve's new virtual reality headset, the Steam Frame, has launched at a higher price than the company originally intended. Valve developer Jeremy Selan told the BBC that the goal had been a far more affordable device, but that global RAM and storage market pressures affected Valve the same way they've hit other manufacturers. He said the company fought hard just to hold the price at its current level.
Another Valve developer, Pierre-Loup Griffais, told Tom's Hardware that the launch price isn't much distorted from the actual cost of the components inside — suggesting the headset ships with little to no markup, similar to how Valve previously confirmed its Steam Machine living-room PC, priced at $1,049, sells near cost.
Asked by IGN why Valve didn't simply reduce the amount of RAM to bring the price down, Griffais explained that development had progressed too far by that point to fundamentally rethink the product.
Specs and context
When Valve first unveiled the Steam Frame, it said it was targeting a price below that of its earlier Valve Index headset, which launched at $999 and required a direct wired connection to a PC. The Steam Frame, by contrast, is wireless: it can stream games from a PC over Wi-Fi or via an included 6GHz USB wireless dongle, and it can also run less demanding games on its own thanks to a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and 16GB of RAM. Valve said that amount of memory was what allowed it to get Half-Life: Alyx running natively on the headset itself.
Despite the higher-than-hoped price, Valve says it's fairly comfortable with where things landed, pointing out that computing hardware in general is getting more expensive right now. Griffais noted that devices with comparable amounts of memory are trending in the same direction, and that the Steam Machine isn't priced any higher than a comparable PC — a pattern he expects will hold for the Frame as well.
