Valve Reveals Steam Frame Price: $1,059, With Half-Life: Alyx Included

Valve opened reservations for its standalone VR headset this week, offering two storage tiers and bundling in a native standalone build of Half-Life: Alyx.

Valve finally slapped a price tag on the Steam Frame. After months of vague "we're still figuring out pricing" answers, the company opened reservations on Monday for two configurations: a 256GB model at $1,059 and a 1TB version at $1,299. Both come with the headset itself, the tracked controllers, and the USB dongle for wireless PC streaming — no extra parts required just to get it running.

The detail that got people talking wasn't the price, though — it was what's bundled in. Every Steam Frame ships with a standalone build of Half-Life: Alyx, running natively on ARM64 straight on the headset, no PC tether needed. Valve says it didn't touch the game's content to make that happen: Workshop mods still work fine, and Steam Cloud keeps saves synced between the standalone and PC VR versions, so you can hop between the two without losing progress.

Anyone who's owned a Quest knows "comes with a free game" is usually a line studios use to justify expensive hardware. This feels different. Alyx is still the single best advertisement VR has ever had, and running it natively — no streaming, no dependence on a discrete GPU — is the clearest signal that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 inside this thing can actually pull its weight. That's on top of the 70-plus titles already certified "Steam Frame Verified" for standalone play.

The annoying part is the charger — it's not in the box. Valve points buyers toward a Steam Deck charger or any 45W-plus USB-C brick, and sells its own 45W unit for $29 if you don't already have one lying around. There's also a $59 ergonomic accessories kit and a $149 color passthrough module called Arcturus Vision, both sold separately.

The reservation system skips the usual scramble too. Instead of first-come-first-served, Valve opened an intent list running until Thursday at 10am Pacific, after which it randomizes the order and starts sending purchase invites on Friday. Anyone not picked in that first batch automatically rolls into a waitlist.

Realistically, $1,059 is a lot of money for a VR headset, even a standalone one with Alyx thrown in — but given how long Valve kept supporting the Steam Deck with software updates, it's a safe bet the Frame gets years of that same treatment. That matters a lot more to someone treating VR as a long-term platform than to someone chasing a weekend novelty.