t’s certainly been a journey for Valve. A week prior to the Steam Frame’s launch, we spoke with two engineers at Valve about the project: Joy Lyons, hardware engineer, and Jeremy Selan, software engineer. The memory crisis and the price were a big part of that conversation. From that chat, we can confirm that Valve had aimed for a lower price point than the one it’s launching the Frame for today.
Here’s Lyons on the memory crisis:
“We set out to design this hardware with one particular price in mind, but we’ve made choices to make sure that we’re making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase, they can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world.”
Lyons also said that forecasting for the cost of certain components used in the Steam Frame is an ongoing challenge.
Not exactly boding well of the Steam Deck 2.
Here’s the thing the expectation was a lower cost because by selling them lower they could pull people out of the Meta ecosystem and into their own. They could even sell at a loss and rack up cash by getting people to purchase games on their platform, not even specifically VR but regular games because the controllers have the same button layout as an actual console controller.
That of course has changed and now it’s well, another Vive, another enthusiast device. Most people won’t own it and Steam’s share of the VR industry will be mostly untouched as most consumers cannot afford the device.