Valve opens Steam Frame VR waiting list with US$1,059 starting price
Valve has opened a waiting list to order the Steam Frame, its new virtual reality headset, with prices starting above US$1,000.
The queue covers the US, the UK and the EU. Shoppers register interest and wait for Valve to offer them a unit to buy, an organised system for managing early demand, according to Digital Foundry. Every kit includes a pair of controllers and a copy of Half-Life: Alyx, Valve's game built for virtual reality, as reported by Video Games Chronicle.
The 256GB Kit costs US$1,059 / £889. The 1TB Kit costs US$1,299 / £1,089. Storage is the difference.
Apart from that storage gap, the two models share the same feature set. The headset is the display and computer worn over the eyes and ears. The controllers are the hand-held units used to aim, grab and move inside virtual spaces. Both kits include the headset and controllers in the box.
A power supply is not included. Buyers will need their own plug and charging kit to power the device, rather than finding one supplied as standard.
Valve has also listed prices beyond the US and UK. The headset is priced at C$1,529 in Canada, A$1,609 in Australia and 4,539 Polish zloty in Poland, according to Digital Foundry. Those figures describe the cost of entry in each market. The reservation queue itself has so far been confirmed for the US, UK and EU.
The Steam Frame is a streaming-first, wireless headset sold with controllers. Streaming-first means most games run elsewhere, on a home PC or over a network, and are sent to the headset to display. Valve says the device is designed to handle a player's whole Steam library, the collection of PC games tied to a Steam account, according to its Steam store listing. Valve announced the Steam Frame alongside the Steam Machine in November 2025.
Earlier reporting had pointed to pressure on parts. Qualcomm is the main chip supplier for the headset, the company that makes the central processor it runs on. In July, Bloomberg reported that Qualcomm was raising its prices by a double-digit amount, as noted by TechPowerUp.
For players, this means a fairly simple calculation and then a wait. The cheaper kit offers the same features with less on-board storage, which matters less if most play is streamed over fast Wi-Fi or fibre. No one buys straight away. The queue decides who gets the offer first.
