Valve blames RAM and storage costs for US$1,059 Steam Frame price
Valve says its wireless Steam Frame headset was intended to be cheaper, but rising memory and storage costs affected the final price.
Valve says the Steam Frame virtual-reality headset was designed to cost less than its reported starting price of US$1,059, but global RAM and storage markets pushed up the bill.
Jeremy Selan, a Valve developer, told the BBC that the company had worked to bring the headset to US$1,059. Pierre-Loup Griffais separately indicated that the price was broadly aligned with the cost of its components, although Valve has not confirmed whether it is selling the device at cost.
Griffais told IGN that Valve could not simply remove RAM to reduce the price because the product was too far into development to be fully rethought. The Steam Frame includes 16GB of RAM, which Valve says allows Half-Life: Alyx to run natively on the headset.
The wireless headset can stream games from a PC over Wi-Fi or an included 6GHz USB wireless dongle. It can also run less demanding games independently using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.
Valve had previously targeted a price below the Valve Index, which launched at US$999 and required a wired PC connection. The Verge reported that the Steam Frame starts at US$1,059 with 256GB of storage, while a 1TB model costs US$1,299.
Australian pricing and availability were not provided in the source material.
