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Xbox CEO Asha Sharma May Have Personally Responded to Your Customer Support Ticket

New-ish Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has had a busy first six months on the job, including killing the divisive "This is Xbox" marketing campaign, slashing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate's subscription price, and unfortunately also overseeing mass layoffs and development studio spin-outs. But as Sharma has gotten settled in her job, she's also been spending time understanding Xbox's products and customers in another way: by fielding customer support tickets.

IGNIGN•Ryan McCaffrey14 Sept

The Steam Frame Was Probably Supposed to Cost About $750

Now that the Steam Frame is here, and we know it starts at $1,059 , it's clear that Valve had to raise the price a bit due to the ongoing RAM crisis. Just like with the Steam Machine, I got a chance to sit down with Valve to talk about the Frame , and I was told by Valve Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais that I could look at the price increases for the Steam Deck and Steam Machine to get a good idea of what the company was initially targeting for the VR headset. For reference, the Steam Deck got a massive price increase back in May, jumping to $789, up from $549. That's a pretty sizable 43% jump, or $240. If the Steam Frame also saw its prices jump by around 43%, it's likely that the headset would have cost around $750, just like the Steam Machine. That would mean the Steam Frame now, due to higher hardware costs for memory and the Qualcomm chip that powers it, is around $310 more expensive than it would have been in the before-times. Now, this is just napkin math, and I could very well be off the target here, but at that original price, the Steam Frame would have been a much more compelling headset, especially since the Meta Quest 3 hasn't yet had a major price increase. Meta's headset, after all, still starts at around $499. Still, even at its current price, the Steam Frame is far from the most expensive PCVR headset on the market right now, especially when you compare it to other wireless headsets. Something like the Samsung Galaxy XR headset will cost you $1,899, and while it has much nicer OLED optics, it has a pretty similar SoC and RAM configuration. Valve isn't alone it its higher-than-normal prices, either. Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X have had major price hikes this year, and pretty much every part of your gaming PC is going up in price, especially graphics cards , SSDs and RAM. It's unlikely that these high prices are going to go away anytime soon, either, as it looks like the memory manufacturing capacity for next year has already been sold through, largely to AI hyperscalers.

IGNIGN•Jacqueline Thomas14 Sept

Why There's No New Game for the Steam Frame

When Valve announced the Steam Frame, Machine, and Controller back in November, there was this undercurrent of hope that the company would release some secret new game to complement its new hardware. And, now that the Steam Frame is here, completing this round of Valve hardware, it's clear that there is no new game coming to support it. Instead, Valve is supporting its new VR headset with Half-Life: Alyx, the game that launched with the Valve Index back in 2019. And with how expensive all of this hardware is , thanks in large part to the ongoing RAM crisis , not having a flagship system-seller makes it hard to imagine that a lot of people are going to rush out to buy it. When I recently sat down with Valve to talk about the Steam Frame , I asked why the headset is launching without a big game to sell it, and was told that the company was focused more on wide compatibility. That's largely because the Steam Frame is running on a chip that's most often found in smartphones, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Valve software developer Jeff Leinbaugh told me they "really prioritized getting software compatibility in a good state so that there would be a huge number of games, I mean as big as possible, available to play on the device or stream to the device on day one." So, instead of one big launch title, Valve wanted the ARM-based headset to give you "a lot of options of what games to play, whether they're VR games or not VR games." It's definitely nice that a lot of Steam Games run on ARM, thanks to the dual translation layers of Proton and FEX, but there is a lot of room to grow. There are plenty of 2D games that run well on Valve's headset, but getting system performance ready for standalone VR games is still a work in progress. To Valve's credit, despite telling us back in November that Half-Life: Alyx would be a lot of work to get running natively on the headset, it did eventually get a 'Steam Frame Verified' certification. Other VR games are more hit or miss, though, and Valve's aware of that. When I asked Leinbaugh about optimization on the Steam Frame, he told me the work on Alyx is key. "Going through the process of making Alyx run standalone is also helping us figure out the new problem of, 'How do we make sure that VR games running standalone are a good experience?'" Because while getting 2D games like Hades II running natively was a relatively simple optimization process, VR is a bigger struggle. "For VR, it's kind of a different story because comfort is a bigger factor," Leinbaugh told me. "So as we've gone through the process of making Alyx run better, we're learning about what's important when we look at other VR games to make sure that we can guarantee this is a good experience without setting a bar that's just unreasonably high." It's clear that Valve is actively working on getting PCVR games that are designed for Windows running on ARM. Just in the two weeks I spent testing the Steam Frame, one of the most popular VR games on the planet, Beat Saber, went from having a big 'unsupported' logo in the UI to having a green checkmark. And now the game runs extremely well, and feels great to play because of how light and balanced the Steam Frame generally is. So, when Valve says that it was focused on getting compatibility down for the Steam Frame’s launch, it seems like it’s still a work in progress. I’m not sure whether or not having a launch title would have complicated standalone VR optimization further, but it at least sounds like the company is focused on getting that performance down. The Steam Deck certainly had its growing pains when it first came out, and I expect that the Steam Frame will as well. Luckily, thanks to the 6GHz dongle included in the box, streaming PCVR games from a desktop PC to the Steam Frame is incredible, so that should help paper over the standalone mode’s rough edges for now. And, if all you cared about was standalone VR in the first place, maybe this is your sign to grab a Meta Quest 3 instead.

IGNIGN•Jacqueline Thomas14 Sept

Steam Frame – The Valve Interview

Now that the Steam Frame is finally here, Valve's entire hardware lineup is now out in the wild. I got a chance to sit down with Valve software developers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Jeff Leinbaugh to talk about the new VR headset, and it sounds like the launch is only the beginning for the Steam Frame. Because while it is more expensive than something like the Meta Quest 3, Valve is hopeful that as an open platform, the Frame is going to be able to evolve over time, and who knows what it's going to be capable of a couple years down the line.

IGNIGN•Jacqueline Thomas14 Sept

The Steam Frame is $1,059, and Much More Expensive Than It Was Supposed to Be

After nearly a year of waiting, the Steam Frame is finally here. But if you were hoping, despite all the hardware price increases, that the Frame would still sneak under the Valve Index's price, I've got bad news. The Steam Frame will start at $1,059, which will net you a 256GB headset, powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor and 16GB of RAM. If you want more storage, you can get the 1TB model, which will cost $1,299. Either model of the Steam Frame comes with two controllers, an eye spacer for glasses, and a dedicated Wi-Fi 6GHz dongle for PCVR streaming. Still, that price is likely going to be a dealbreaker for anyone that wanted a Meta Quest 3 killer, but the Frame does have some technology that Meta's headset just doesn't have. The Frame has eye tracking, a dedicated wireless PC dongle, and twice the RAM. The headset is also designed first and foremost for streaming PCVR games, and in my time with the headset, it excels at that. But if you want an affordable VR headset that primarily plays standalone VR games, Meta's headset is probably still the way to go. Still, among dedicated PCVR headsets, the Steam Frame's price isn't really that outside of the norm. Headsets like the $1,799 Samsung Galaxy XR or the $899 Pimax Crystal Light have a lot of the same capabilities as the Frame, though the latter is wired-only. Just like with the Steam Machine, it's clear that the Steam Frame is more expensive than Valve was originally planning. When I got a chance to sit down with Valve and talk about the headset , I was told the same thing as when we spoke about the Machine: that the Steam Frame had a similar sort of price increase as Valve's mini PC and handheld . That shouldn't be too surprising, though. With the ongoing RAMpocalypse , prices have only been going up over the last year or so, and even the PS5 and Xbox Series X have been affected. How to Buy Steam Frame If you do still want to get your hands on the Steam Frame, it's available for reservation today. Just like with the Steam Machine and Steam Controller , Valve has open reservations, and you can sign up for whichever model you want between now and September 17 at 10am PST . Then, when those initial signups close, Valve will shuffle the entries and split people into a reservation list and a waitlist. If you sign up after the 17th, you'll be added to the back of the waitlist. The Steam Frame should start shipping out on September 18, and as people on the reservation list get their units, Valve will email folks from the waitlist and move them to the reservation list. If it's anything like the Steam Machine and Steam Controller, though, you can expect the reservation list to be stretched through the end of the year, and probably into the first few months of next year.

IGNIGN•Jacqueline Thomas14 Sept