Valve Apologized to VR Developers in Seoul Over What the Steam Frame Costs

I read it twice, the second time through a translator, because Valve does not do this. The company talks in patch notes, hardware pages and the occasional FAQ. On Tuesday evening, in a cafe in Seoul's Gangnam district, one of its Steam business people stood in front of a room of Korean indie developers and said sorry. Not to players. To VR developers.

The event was Steam Indie Connect, a private night for Korean indie studios run by the Busan Indie Connect Festival committee and the Korea Creative Content Agency. Inven's report on it, by Lee Du-hyeon, is mostly about AI clones and Next Fest. The VR part is the last question. The head of a VR studio asked whether Steam's curation, visibility and policies for VR games would change now that Valve sells a headset of its own, and passed along a worry going around among VR fans: that Valve had given up on VR.

Tom Giardino, from Valve's Steam business team, took it. Inven quotes his first line as "We still believe in virtual reality."

Then he got specific, and very little of it was flattering. By Inven's account, he said a considerable number of Steam Frame owners are not playing VR games on it at all. They play the ordinary games in their library and use the Frame as a screen. He called VR's problem a chicken and an egg, with developers waiting for a bigger market and players waiting for more games, while flat games keep getting better and something like Escape from Tarkov turns up every week to take their time and money. He said rising RAM and memory prices pushed up the cost of all hardware, Valve's included, and that Valve had wanted the Frame cheaper so it could bring new people in.

Then the line that matters. In Inven's Korean, he said the moment Valve could have welcomed a lot of new customers "became a reason to wait or hesitate on VR," and that he was sorry to VR developers.

One caution before anybody hangs a headline on a single English word. The session ran in English with live interpretation into Korean, and no public recording has turned up, so every English version of these lines is a translation of a translation. InvenGlobal's English edition first printed "We feel sorry to VR developers." By Thursday it read "I feel sorry." The Korean has no subject at all. The meaning survives. The exact words do not.

Using it as a monitor was the pitch

The flat-games part is being passed around like a confession. I do not read it that way. Valve's launch post on September 14 called the Frame a headset "built for both VR and non-VR gameplay" that "can handle your entire Steam library," and Jeremy Selan told the BBC that day that the hope was people would play their non-VR games on it too. In July I argued that the killer app was your Steam library. People heard the pitch and bought the thing to do what it said it did.

What stings is hearing the other half of it from Valve. A Frame running Tarkov is a Frame not running a VR game, and a VR studio cannot sell anything to an owner who never opens one.

But think about where that owner is sitting. The headset is already on their face. Every VR developer I have ever talked to would give a lot to get a customer to that exact spot, because the hardest steps, buying a headset and actually wearing it, are done. It is the shortest walk in this whole industry. Somebody just has to put a VR game at the end of it.

What the sorry was for

Read the apology again. It is not about flat games. It is about price.

The Frame launched at $1,059 for 256GB and $1,299 for 1TB, which is $60 more than the old Index full kit. Valve had already blamed the memory market on launch day. "We set out to come out with a device that would have been much more affordable," Selan told the BBC. "But the global Ram market has impacted us the same way it's impacted everybody."

What Seoul adds is the cost on the other side of that number. A launch is the one window when people who have never owned a headset, the ones who tried a friend's Quest at a party and thought about it all the way home, actually stop and look at one. At $1,059 a lot of them looked, and waited. The way I read Giardino, Valve is saying out loud that the people who paid for that waiting were the developers who had been counting on those customers showing up.

The wait is literal, too. Valve's only other headset, the Index, is in its sunset sale, and the Frame sells through a reservation queue and a waitlist. My own spot on the 1TB waitlist still has no date. For the developers in that cafe it is further off again: Valve's launch post listed South Korea as "coming soon," and no Steam Hardware post since has given a date. They were hearing about a headset Valve does not yet sell in their own country.

The number that matters more than 0.41

Valve's own survey put the Frame at 0.41 percent of VR headsets on Steam in September, after 13 days of sales. In the same table the Quest 3, Quest 2 and Quest 3S add up to 63.77 percent. That is where a VR developer's Steam customers actually are, and Giardino said as much. Inven reports him calling the Frame one piece of the VR ecosystem, and pointing to the work Valve has put into Steam Link for Quest and into OpenXR so that people who bought somebody else's headset can still get into SteamVR.

That was the most useful part of the whole answer, and it got the least attention. Valve's biggest VR audience in 2026 reaches it through Meta's hardware. The Frame is the halo. The Quests are the crowd.

The half nobody answered

Go back to the question, though. The developer asked about curation, visibility and policy for VR games on Steam, and in Inven's report nothing in the answer touches it. Sympathy, a price explanation, a chicken and an egg. No shelf.

I run a small studio myself, and if I had been holding that microphone I would have taken the apology and asked the question again. A platform cannot fix memory prices. It can decide what a Frame owner sees between rounds of Tarkov.

I believe him that Valve still believes. You do not build a headset, get Half-Life: Alyx running on it standalone and then send foveated rendering back to the six-year-old PC version if you have given up on VR. Sorry was a decent thing to say to that room. I would trade it in a heartbeat for a lower price, or for a Frame that sometimes asks its owner whether they want to try something in VR tonight.