This Week in VR: Valve Says Sorry in Seoul, Titanfall 2 VR Gets Multiplayer, and XREAL Refunds the People Who Paid First

The Quest 3 on the shelf by my desk turned three this month, and Mark Zuckerberg now says Meta will "only ship new devices when we have major breakthroughs." The 1TB Steam Frame I am on the waitlist for still has no date. Those were my two headset problems going into this week. Then on Tuesday somebody from Valve stood up in a cafe in Seoul and said sorry, and they stopped feeling like just mine.

Sorry, from Seoul

I wrote this up yesterday, so the short version. Tom Giardino of Valve's Steam business team took a question at a private night for Korean indie studios, and Inven's report has him saying that a considerable number of Frame owners use it as a screen for flat games, that memory prices kept it above where Valve wanted it, and that he was sorry to VR developers. The room ran on live interpretation, so every English version of those lines is a translation of a translation. What the studio head actually asked, whether Steam will treat VR games any differently now that Valve sells a headset, got no answer in Inven's account.

Valve did better in the small print. The October 26 patch for Half-Life: Alyx gave the PC version the foveated rendering built for the Frame, and the setup guide behind it covers eye tracking on 13 headset families. One of them is Valve's. PS VR2 owners get pointed at PlayStation VR2 Toolkit, a free fan project, because Sony's PC adapter leaves eye tracking off. Get it from that GitHub page only.

My favorite Valve story this week took 8 minutes and 53 seconds. A Steam forum poster asked why the Frame cannot use a disc drive, wanting a movie and a 2006 copy of Need for Speed Carbon. Valve's Gabe Rowe replied, "we will look into this thanks for alerting us," and that long after the reply a commit in the Frame's kernel source switched on three CD-ROM config lines. Alex has the fine print: nothing reaches a headset until a SteamOS build carries it, film playback is a separate problem, and Carbon's copy protection may still say no. I was putting floppy disks in computers before CD-ROMs, so this one made me happy in a way I cannot defend. A $1,059 headset. A disc drive. Somebody at Valve said fine.

A condition instead of a calendar

Zuckerberg's line came on Meta's October 21 earnings call, and Jordan worked through it on Monday. Reality Labs took in $443 million for the quarter against $470 million a year earlier, and Meta's 10-Q pins the drop on "lower Meta Quest sales." Jordan's read is that Quest 3 and 3S are now a build target with no end date, and that Meta VR Glasses are the one new profile a developer has to plan for.

My Quest 3 starts to bother me in under an hour, so I would happily pay for a breakthrough. Nobody will tell me when to expect one. That may be the honest answer. It is still a strange thing to hear from the company behind most of the headsets on Steam.

AURA, $180 under itself

Last Friday AURA did not have a ship date. Now it has one, and a lower price. XREAL opened orders on Wednesday at $1,099 for 12GB and 256GB and $1,299 for 16GB and 512GB, through December, down from the $1,279 and $1,499 it set on October 7. First shipments are expected in mid-November, BestBuy.com sells it in the US, and Japan's orders open Monday.

Alex's piece today is about the people who already paid. XREAL says anyone who paid in full at the old price before October 28 gets the difference back, $180 or $200 by model, to the original payment method, with refunds expected to start within 30 days. Plenty of companies would have let early buyers eat that difference. The refund sits on the sales page, in a panel next to the new price, which is where I want to see it.

The library is filling in. Fallout: Factions, the Mirrorscape and Modiphius tabletop game, reaches AURA next month, Road to VR reports. If you are buying, read Alex's section on the two frame sizes first. The size is set at checkout, and the page XREAL sends you to for measuring your eyes lists a ruler and a mirror among the options.

Nine questions for Meta

Senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey sent Zuckerberg a letter on Wednesday about Meta's camera glasses, and Meta has until November 25 to answer it. There are nine requests, covering whether Meta evaluated voyeurism as a risk, when contractors can see footage, how imagery gets picked for AI training, and whether the people captured can ask for their data to be deleted. 404 Media has the story, and its October 2025 investigation into men filming massage parlor workers on Ray-Ban glasses is cited in the letter. Sam's piece today goes through the requests one by one. The sentence I keep rereading: "Human review to fulfill a service knowingly requested by the person depicted is one thing; exposing unsuspecting individuals' intimate moments to strangers for AI training is quite another."

A letter compels nothing. California's SB 1130, which would have required a visible camera indicator, was vetoed on September 30. So the pressure on this product is still reporters, plaintiffs and two senators with a date on a calendar.

What to play this weekend

The one I want most: Titanfall 2 VR has multiplayer. CircuitLord's installer now lists a multiplayer open beta next to the campaign builds, and Road to VR reports NA and EU servers. It is free, it is a beta, and you need your own copy of Titanfall 2 and a PC VR headset. Get the installer from that GitHub page and nowhere else. Our guide has the steps. Sprint Vector made me so sick that I treat fast movement in a headset with respect, and a wall-running Pilot on a grappling hook is about as fast as VR gets, so this may end with me lying on the floor. I am trying it anyway.

EXOSHOCK went into early access this week at $19.99 on Quest and Steam, a co-op shooter for up to four from POLARITYONE that Road to VR calls Halo-inspired. VR and flat PC players share the same game, which is a nice answer to the friend who will not buy a headset.

No Man's Sky got its free Forsaken update this week. UploadVR lists traders at deep-space outposts who send you into wrecks, infested outposts and freighters, plus courier contracts and a minimal HUD mode that hides the compass and most of the markers. I have hundreds of hours in that game. The HUD setting is going on before I do anything else.

Halloween is tomorrow. Phasmophobia's Crimson Eye runs through Sunday, and the results are in for the VR IS DEAD jam Jordan covered on Saturday, all 17 entries free. Kick the Bucket VR from Button Masher Brew Games took first overall, a seated Quest sideload where you are the night-shift grave digger in a backhoe, just ahead of Trick or Yeet! VR.

Read this before you sign in

Venture is a free app that runs the Quest games your Meta account owns on a PC VR headset, and it shipped four builds in its first ten hours. Road to VR advised holding off. Nina read the source instead. Your password stays on Meta's own page, ownership gets checked before every download and every launch, and the app labels its traffic, so Meta can see exactly what it is. What Meta decides to do about that is the part nobody can read in a repo. If your Quest library matters to you, that is the whole risk, and the Import page, which skips the ownership check, is one to leave alone.

She also went through PICO's plugin marketplace, which puts its XR SDK behind ten AI coding assistants with one npm line. If you build for PICO, read every skill before you let an agent act on it, as she says.

Hardware from both ends of the scale

Vector Gear's $650 Andromeda jumped from 1600x1600 to 2160x2160 panels and from a 45Wh to an 85Wh cell three days into its Kickstarter, at the same price, and it stood just under 24 percent of its $150,000 goal on Saturday. At the other extreme, Sega published the spec sheet for House of the Dead: Reawakened. The cabinet weighs 630 kilograms. The headset on the gun is a rotation-only DPVR E4C. It debuts at IAAPA Orlando on November 17, and there is still no price, though I now know the headset cable is load-tested to 130 kg, which is more than I knew when I wrote up the teaser on October 3.

Next week

Hyper Dash's servers close Sunday, with a final update that keeps it launching offline. Crimson Eye ends the same day. AURA orders open in Japan on Monday. Thursday is the big one: PAYDAY: Aces High at $24.99 on Quest, SteamVR and Steam Frame, and Zero Caliber 2 on PS VR2.

Tomorrow night I have five graves to finish before 6:00 AM and a supervisor named Earl on the CB radio. It beats refreshing a waitlist page.