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The Steam Frame headset is here, and it may not surprise you: it was supposed to cost less than $1,059. \u201cWe set out to come out with a device that would have been far more affordable, but the global RAM market, the global storage market have impacted us the same way they\u2019ve impacted everybody,\u201d Valve developer Jeremy Selan told the BBC. \u201cWe fought hard to get it even to this price.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I haven\u2019t yet seen Valve say whether it\u2019s selling the Steam Frame at cost, like the company confirmed it was doing with the $1,049 Steam Machine living room PC. But Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais hinted maybe so in an interview with Tom\u2019s Hardware<\/em>: \u201cthere\u2019s not really any sort of the kind of distortion compared to just the price of the parts in there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When IGN <\/em>asked Griffais why Valve didn\u2019t simply ship the Steam Frame with less RAM, he answered: \u201cI think at this point, things were a little bit too far in development to fully rethink the product.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When it first announced the Steam Frame, Valve said it was targeting a lower price than its previous Valve Index headset, which cost $999 at launch and required a direct plug into a PC. The Steam Frame is wireless, can stream from a PC over Wi-Fi or its included 6GHz USB wireless dongle, and it can also play not-so-demanding games on its own Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and 16GB of RAM. Valve said that amount of RAM helped it get Half-Life: Alyx<\/em> running natively on the headset.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While the price might be high, Valve says it\u2019s \u201cpretty comfortable\u201d with it because other computing gear is getting more expensive at the same time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201c[I]f you look at the memory and anything that has a similar amount of memory, it\u2019s kind of trending the same direction and Steam Machine is not really getting more expensive than a comparable PC,\u201d Griffais told IGN. \u201cThey\u2019re kind of evolving at the same spot in the same market, and I think the same will apply to the Frame as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n