Steam Frame: impressions a week on

I got my hands on a Valve Steam Frame recently, the 1TB kit at £1,089 (the 256GB kit is £889). The plan was two-player Beat Saber sessions with the kids, with the added bonus of nobody tripping over the cable on my Valve Index. A week in, here’s where I’ve landed.

Fit and comfort

Coming from the Index, the Frame is noticeably lighter, even with a battery strapped to the back of your head, and putting the battery there makes for good weight distribution too.

Sadly, that’s about where my positive impressions of the fit stop.

There’s width adjustment for the lenses, but no forwards and backwards (eye relief) adjustment like the Index has. I wear glasses and have bought separate prescription lenses, so it’s frustrating that I may end up tinkering with different gaskets to get the right fit. Valve’s £49 Accessory Replacement Kit won’t help there: it’s just the same face gasket, head cushion and standard light blocker that come in the box, so a different fit means going third-party. The seal onto the face isn’t great either: with or without the included gasket, and even without glasses, there’s a lot of light bleed around the nose.

The single strap leaves me wanting too. When I physically press the lower front of the headset against my face, the image is a lot crisper for me. Hopefully that’s something an angled gasket can fix, but the lack of adjustment options makes it frustrating out of the box.

It’s clear Valve had to make cost savings to get the product to market at a price it thought was feasible. Personally, I think that was a mistake: on a headset costing upwards of £889, it harms the overall impression of the device. Valve sells a £59 Ergonomic Accessories Kit separately, “designed for comfort during extended play sessions”. It contains the extended light blocker, which should be in the box by default, along with a headset top strap and two controller hand straps that double as battery doors.

The power supply isn’t in the box either: Valve’s own 45W unit is £29, though any USB-C charger rated 45W or higher will do, including a Steam Deck charger. That one I can live with, since most of us have a suitable charger already. The ergonomics of the headset shouldn’t be skimped on.

Battery life

Don’t expect more than an hour or two from the 20.9Wh battery,¹ but it’s easy enough to extend. Put a power bank in a back pocket, run a USB-C cable up your back to the headset, and you’re in business, still wireless and free to move.

For that, I wouldn’t go above 20,000mAh: banks that size are slim enough for a pocket, and about as bulky as you’d want. For sitting down, say on a long-haul flight, something like Anker’s 27,650mAh Prime will see you through a movie marathon. At 99.54Wh it sits just under the 100Wh limit most airlines allow in hand luggage without approval, but check with your airline before you fly.

Colour passthrough

I also picked up the Arcturus Vision colour passthrough camera for £129. It clips into the Frame’s front expansion port. I can’t judge it fairly yet: I’ve done little more than plug it in and see a colour background in the main menu. Hopefully some good use cases turn up for it.

Arcturus does have a couple of free Steam apps I’m yet to explore: Arcturus Vision Camera, a dedicated camera app for recording and playing back 3D spatial video, and Arcturus Vision Gaussian XR, for exploring Gaussian splat scenes in VR. I had to go digging to find them, though. It’d be nice to see Steam offer to install them automatically when the hardware is plugged in, and Arcturus could easily have popped a leaflet into its minimal packaging to point them out.

Controllers

For me the controllers are a small step backwards in some places and a step forwards in others.

The main buttons are angled so they feel like a bit of a reach from my natural holding position, and I have to consciously position my hand to sit on the controller properly. Again, the Ergonomic Accessories Kit’s straps look like they address problems that shouldn’t really exist with the straps included in the box.

On the plus side, I’m glad we have bumpers and triggers now. I’m also fine with losing the Index’s full finger tracking: that was fun, but rarely needed. And the controllers running on AA batteries is a nice touch.

SteamOS, the store and streaming

The Steam interface is fairly intuitive and familiar if you’ve used Steam before. Setting up the play area was quick and simple too, a big improvement over placing base stations and drawing out your play space on the Index.

Where Valve could do better is the Great on Frame section of the store. As of early October there were over 200 Steam Frame Verified games, 70 of them VR-only,² and the badge only covers standalone play on the headset. What it doesn’t tell you is whether a game was built natively for the Frame or is a port, and I’d like to see that made much clearer.

Moss is a good example. It’s better streamed than installed directly. Install it on the headset and you get what looks like the Quest build, running through Lepton, Valve’s Android compatibility layer for standalone VR apps. It’s buggy to boot: the second time I played it, the game simply refused to open until I’d fiddled with the compatibility settings. Streaming it from my gaming PC, on the other hand, was flawless every time.

As a side note, it’s a real shame to see the developer of the Moss games, Polyarc, close down. They were doing great things.

It works the other way round, too. Townsmen VR, one of my favourites, doesn’t claim any Frame Verified status, but it appears to run fine on the headset. It probably should try to get the badge.

So my overall conclusion for gaming on the Frame: buy it intending to keep streaming games, at least until the native catalogue improves. Valve is doing fantastic work porting games to the headset, including running x86 PC games through its FEX translation layer, and it’s worth reading up on if you’re interested. It’s an uphill struggle, but if anyone can do it, it’s Valve. Between the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine and now the Frame, there’s a ton of investment going into the systems underneath, and I’m all for it.

A full Linux desktop on your face

That leads nicely to the Frame’s best surprise: you get a full Linux desktop environment, and it feels extremely developer-friendly.

Within ten minutes I had Claude Code, Anthropic’s command-line tool, installed through the terminal on the desktop, with push-to-talk working from inside VR. That felt very cool. I had it give me a rundown of the headset’s capabilities, then had it explore mirroring my phone into the headset. I got that working with my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 (the Z Fold 8 is the current model) and scrcpy, though it meant switching off Samsung’s Auto Blocker and turning on USB debugging, which isn’t a combination I’d want to leave enabled day to day.

I expect I’ll be tinkering with this a lot more. It’s genuinely interesting, and people on Reddit are already doing amazing things with it.

Repairs and mods

A shout-out to iFixit for its Steam Frame teardown. It’s a great look inside: the lenses, foams and nose bridge come out easily, while the glued-in battery and the buried fan are the weak spots.

Valve has also released the Frame’s CAD files for non-commercial use,³ so community mods should be on the way soon. Given my gasket and strap gripes, I’m hoping someone prints a better-fitting face interface before long.

Verdict

It’s such an interesting device, and I hope it does well, but it needs to find its place in the market. Right now the native games are heavily backed by Valve’s own porting effort rather than by developers building for the Frame. Until that changes, I’d treat it as a lighter, wireless PC VR headset first, and a standalone console second. The Linux desktop is the wildcard, and it’s the part I’m most excited to keep exploring.

I’m also looking forward to finding the time to set up both the Index and the Frame for a head-to-head in Beat Saber, and seeing how well they play together locally. I’ll report back on that another time.

My recommendations

Battery and power

• USB-C cable for running a power bank to the headset
• 20,000mAh power bank: slim enough for a back pocket
• Anker Prime 27,650mAh power bank: for long seated sessions and flights
• Venom Steam Frame Charging Dock & Display Stand: somewhere tidy to park and charge the headset

Phone

• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8: the successor to the Fold 7 I mirrored into the headset

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