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Valve is “still working on VR and still pushing forward on it”

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Valve unveiled its Steam Deck OLED late last week, offering up a hardware refresh for the first time since the company launched the handheld gaming device last year. While the company has been full steam ahead on handhelds and developing Steam OS, Valve says it’s “still pushing forward” on VR.

Valve ostensibly has a standalone VR headset in the works, and although there wasn’t any big announcement (or acknowledgement) of what the company has in store just yet. Talking to Norman Chan of Tested though, it was revealed the company is still working on VR.

In an interview, Valve designer Lawrence Yang spoke about the overlap between Steam Deck’s design relative to its VR efforts:

“There’s a lot of things [informing hardware decisions]. Working with an APU, working with miniaturization of computers. We don’t have anything to announce today in terms of a VR other than we are still working on VR, and we’re still pushing forward on it. Just like Steam Deck is learning a bunch of stuff from controllers and VR, future products will continue to learn from everything we’ve done with Steam Deck.”

“Obviously there’s a lot of overlap, from technology pieces that we can use; wireless streaming is very applicable to VR. That benefitted Steam Deck as well in improving the wireless experience. But also from just establishing relationships with part suppliers, hardware partners, and that kind of stuff. The SteamVR team and the Steam Deck team work together. There’s a lot of inoculation of ideas, parts and technologies.”

At Steam Deck’s initial launch in February 2022, Valve chief Gabe Newell told Edge Magazine that Steam Deck represented a “steppingstone” to portable VR for the company thanks to its battery-capable, high-performance horsepower.

More recently, the company released its long-awaited SteamVR 2.0 which drastically upgraded the platform’s VR interface. Whether this is in preparation for an upcoming VR standalone headset remains to be seen; it’s certainly a knock-on effect of improvements made specifically for Steam Deck’s UI.

You can check out the full breakdown of Steam Deck OLED in the Tested video below:

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Update to SteamVR Suggests Valve is Still Working on a Standalone Headset

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Valve is a notorious black box when it comes to basically everything. A recent update to Steam client for VR though suggests the company is still working behind the scenes on what appears to be its long-awaited standalone VR headset.

As revealed by tech analyst and consummate Steam data miner Brad Lynch, a recent update to Steam’s client included a number of VR-specific strings related to batteries, which seems to support the idea that Valve is currently readying the platform for some sort of standalone VR headset.

Image courtesy Brad Lynch

The update also included mention of new UI elements, icons, and animations added to the Steam Client for VR—something it probably wouldn’t do for a competitor’s headset, like Meta’s soon-to-release Quest 3 standalone.

Meanwhile, South Korean’s National Radio Research Agency (RAA) recently certified a “low-power wireless device” from Valve, also spotted by Lynch. It’s still too early to say whether the device in question is actually a standalone VR headset—the radio certification only mentions it uses 5 GHz wireless—however headsets like Meta Quest 2 are equally as vague when it comes to RAA listings.

Granted, Valve hasn’t come out and said it’s developing a standalone VR headset yet, although with mounting competition from Apple and Meta, 2024 may be the year we finally see the ‘Index of standalone VR’ come to the forefront. Valve Index has widely been regarded as the ‘best fit’ PC VR headset, owing to its excellent quality, performance, and comfort—something we called “the enthusiast’s choice” in our full review of the headset back when it launched in 2019.

But it hasn’t been entirely mum either. In early 2022, Valve chief Gabe Newell called its handheld gaming PC platform Steam Deck “a steppingstone” to standalone VR hardware, nothing that Steam Deck represented “battery-capable, high-performance horsepower that eventually you could use in VR applications as well.”

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While a capable, high-end standalone VR headset from Valve is certainly something to salivate over, a few big questions remain: What will happen when Valve opens Steam up to standalone VR content? How would the largely Meta-heavy ecosystem react as Steam becomes a new outlet for VR games? And what if Valve’s headset is instead capable of playing some subsection of standard PC VR content? We don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but with Valve’s continued interest in VR, we’re still pretty hopeful to find out.

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Valve Interview Confirms Its VR Ambitions Are Alive and Kicking

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If you’ve been plugged into the Valve leak-o-verse, you’ve probably come across the name ‘Deckard’, the supposed code name of a standalone headset allegedly under development by the one and only. While Valve isn’t confirming anything about the storied standalone, the company went on record late last year to say they are still have faith in VR, and are critically still working on VR headsets.

Valve product designer Greg Coomer spoke to Korean gaming publication This is Game (Korean) in December, saying that VR is very much still in the works. The interview wasn’t widely shared in the English-speaking side of the Internet until it landed on Reddit, Google-translated to English.

Here’s Coomer’s response to a question about what he can reveal in regard to VR, translated from Korean to English:

There isn’t much (laughter). Nevertheless, I can definitely say that we are continuing to develop VR headsets recently. Valve has a lot of expertise in VR devices and has faith in the medium and VR games.

We hope to remain open on PC platforms rather than having VR games exclusively on a certain platform. While adhering to this belief, we are continuing development.

However, we cannot confirm the existence of specific products or disclose the release date of the results. The same applies to game projects being developed internally. There are certainly many projects underway, but we cannot announce anything today.

As you might gather, Valve doesn’t openly speak about its in-development projects. Hearing that VR is still on the table from Coomer directly though, who has been with Valve since the release of Half-Life (1998), and worked on major games all the way up to Half-Life: Alyx (2020), is just about as good as you can get.

That’s especially so since the last time Valve released any VR hardware was its enthusiast-grade PC VR headset Valve Index in 2019. A year later, the studio launched its only full-length VR game to date, Half-Life: Alyx.

Still, it hasn’t been entirely all quiet on the Valve VR front. In March 2022, Valve chief Gabe Newell called its handheld gaming PC platform Steam Deck “a steppingstone” to standalone VR hardware.

“One of the things [Steam Deck] represents is battery-capable, high-performance horsepower that eventually you could use in VR applications as well. You can take the PC and build something that is much more transportable. We’re not really there yet, but this is a stepping stone.”

At the time, Coomer also noted Steam Deck’s hardware “would run well in that [standalone VR] environment, with the TDP necessary… it’s very relevant to us and our future plans.”

Meanwhile, tech analyst and YouTuber Brad Lynch has been probably the most vocal proponent of all things Steam standalone, having followed the Deckard beat since data miners first found a string in a January 2021 Steam update that mentioned the alleged VR standalone.

Over the following years, Lynch has uncovered mounting evidence in subsequent releases of SteamVR, including his most recent supposition that Deckard may include PC VR wireless streaming capabilities, eye-tracking, and passthrough AR features.

As you’d imagine, there have been no public confirmations from Valve, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

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