This Week in VR: Frame Launch Week, From the $1,059 Price to the Waitlist Email

Somebody on eBay is selling a screenshot. That is the product. A picture of a Steam Frame reservation email, lifted off the internet and edited, listed for somebody who got the waitlist email Thursday and wants that feeling gone by the weekend. UploadVR rounded up the listings the night Valve's draw went out, and its warning is blunt: those screenshots can be copied and altered to fool "anyone desperate or gullible enough to pay twice the retail price or more."

Don't. Valve's own announcement says it runs reservations this way partly for "limiting resellers," and a reservation is the model "reserved in your name," on the Steam account that signed up. The purchase email goes to that account. Best case, you pay a stranger double for a headset they buy and ship to you later. Worst case you paid for a JPEG.

Roughly half, if the tracker is right

Valve closed signups at 10 a.m. Pacific on Thursday, shuffled the whole list once, and sent everyone one of two emails: reservation queue or waitlist. It has not said how many people signed up or how many units the first batch covers. The closest thing to a public number is a community tracker called steamframeout, where people report their own result, and when PC Gamer checked it Friday, about 35,000 people had answered: 44.7 percent reserved, 51.6 percent waitlisted, 3.8 percent still staring at an empty inbox. That is a self-selected crowd of people keen enough to go find a tracker. It is a mood, not a census. It is also the only data anybody has.

If you landed in the queue, the first batch of purchase emails starts going out today, in shuffle order, and each one gives you 72 hours to buy. Miss the window and the unit moves down the line. If you landed on the waitlist, you move up when people ahead of you pass, and Valve says later production runs go to the waitlist in order. Nina's sign-up guide still has every rule, including why somebody in another region can get an email while you are still waiting.

A lottery feels terrible when you lose it. I would still take it over a 10 a.m. refresh war, which is a contest bots win.

Everything else from Monday

The price was $1,059 for 256GB and $1,299 for 1TB, and Alex found the line that stings: no charger in the box, $29 extra. Sam ran every regional price net of sales tax and VAT, and the spread goes from $982 in Poland to $1,101 in Canada. Jordan dug out the fact that full color passthrough lives in a $149 Arcturus Vision camera that Valve's own developer docs never mention. And the pack-in is Half-Life: Alyx, which I wrote about Monday because Valve ported it to run on the headset itself.

Put the quiet stuff from the days before launch next to that. Jordan counted 52 of the 130 certified games running through Lepton, Valve's Android layer. Nina found the line worth reading in SteamVR 2.17: a 32-bit OpenXR runtime, which is how older 32-bit apps find the runtime at all. None of it made a headline anywhere. All of it decides what this thing plays in a year.

Polyarc

Polyarc wound down on September 11, almost twelve years in, eight days after it shipped a free local co-op update for Moss: The Forgotten Relic. I wrote about the order those dates came in on Sunday. It reads worse every time I look at it.

Snap showed Specs again, still without a date

Snap's September 16 event gave Specs a $2,395 bundle with a cellular charging case, Verizon data plans from $10 a month, an AI assistant called SPECS Intelligence, and five enterprise partners. It did not give Specs a ship date. Shipping is still "expected to begin later this fall." Sam went through the enterprise half line by line today, and his sort is fair: two partners describe products that exist, three describe work in progress, and the device management vendors go unnamed.

My angle is smaller. Scan Snap's release for games and you find basketball drills, soccer and golf training, and a shelf of Connected Lenses: dominoes with Jimmy Butler, chess, table tennis. That is the lineup at $2,195.

Apple shipped visionOS 27 the same Monday

Apple put out visionOS 27 on September 14, per MacRumors, the same day Valve priced the Frame, and it got buried. It deserves better. UploadVR's feature list runs long: Siri AI in beta behind a waitlist, English only; native Gaussian splat rendering in RealityKit; high-quality recording without foveation; and an API for IR LED tracked accessories. That last one is the door Nina saw coming in July, when Apple published 74 pages on how to build controllers for a headset it once said did not need them. Somebody has to build one now.

Games that moved

I AM YOUR BEAST VR landed on SteamVR Thursday, Flat2VR Spark's take on Strange Scaffold's revenge shooter, and UploadVR's review in progress is titled "I Am A Speedrunning Badass," which is about the best sentence a speedrun game can get.

Sol Protocol slipped two days. Singular Perception told UploadVR the Quest early access date moved from September 17 to tomorrow, September 19, with Steam early access in October. I previewed it in August as a three-seat ship that lives or dies on whether your friends show up, and UploadVR's impressions land in the same place.

Into the Radius 2 on PS VR2 moved from September 24 to October 8. CM Immersive's email to UploadVR says final certification turned up "a few things that still need attention." Two weeks for a port that has to clear Sony's cert. I will take it.

Wednesday, 4 p.m. Pacific

Meta Connect's keynote is Wednesday at 4 p.m. Pacific, and the Connect hub has everything reported so far. The two stories worth reading before then: Alex on Luna, smart glasses with six microphones and no camera, and Jordan on the hologram-style call Zuckerberg and Bosworth are reportedly going to place on a Phoenix headset live on stage.

Valve took Monday. Meta walks out Wednesday with no new headset to sell and a pair of glasses that cannot see. For the first time in a long while, the week before Connect felt like it belonged to somebody else.