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Steam Frame: plenty to play 🎮

Great on Frame now lists more than 130 VR and conventional games and apps. Is that enough to make Steam Frame a hit?

Steam Frame: plenty to play 🎮

We checked in again on Great on Frame, and wow: it now lists more than 130 games and apps, both VR and conventional ones.

Here's an important clarification from Valve: the compatibility check is for games running directly on Steam Frame, without a gaming PC. They run on the headset itself.

To be fair, the list contains plenty of games you'd expect: SUPERHOT VR, Beat Saber, Arizona Sunshine 2, the remake of the first Arizona Sunshine, Pistol Whip, Moss... Quite the VR all-star team. Among conventional games there's Hades, Portal 2, Balatro and Hollow Knight: Silksong. There is certainly something to play.

The device has already attracted reviews, too. Some praise how smoothly supported VR games run: PC Gamer, for example, liked playing Eleven Table Tennis on the standalone headset at 120 Hz.

But honestly, there was no big surprise. I still don't see a new system-seller for Steam Frame: no high-profile exclusive that makes you want to buy the headset immediately. A standalone port of Alyx is welcome, of course, but the game itself is already familiar.

And that's a shame: a strong selection of old favourites is unlikely to spark a new wave of interest in VR.

My main hope lies with Steam's conventional game library. The headset has 16 GB of shared memory for the CPU and GPU — twice as much as Quest 3. That's useful headroom, although which games run will also depend on performance and ARM compatibility.

If Valve keeps improving all this, perhaps the hardware will comfortably run a sizeable slice of the regular Steam library. In other words, the library could drive sales rather than exclusives.

My conclusion: Steam Frame is a Steam Deck with a giant “screen” perched on your face 😌