Valve Steam Frame: Release Date, Price, Specs, and Everything We Know

Last updated: September 14, 2026

Deep dives: release date tracker, price tracker, and the Great on Frame verified games list, the full spec sheet, a guide to what games run on it, plus our Steam Frame vs Quest 3 comparison. Part of our VR release dates tracker. For buying advice today, see the best PC VR headsets.

The Steam Frame is Valve's wireless, streaming-first SteamOS VR headset, and it launched on September 14, 2026. The 256GB Kit costs $1,059 and the 1TB Kit $1,299, each with the Steam Frame Controllers, a Wi-Fi 6E wireless adapter for PC streaming, and a copy of Half-Life: Alyx. The power supply is sold separately for $29. You buy one through a randomized reservation list: signups close Thursday, September 17 at 10:00 AM Pacific, and the first purchase emails go out September 18. Valve counts over 100 games Steam Frame Standalone Verified at launch. This page links every piece of our reporting, from the November 2025 announcement through launch week, and keeps tracking the headset as it reaches buyers.

Release date: launched September 14, 2026

Valve's Steam Hardware account posted "Steam Frame is here!" at 10:01 AM Pacific on Monday, September 14, and opened reservations in the same post. It is the Steam Machine playbook again, and Valve says so, citing the reservation system as a way to improve the purchase experience and limit resellers. Signups stay open until Thursday, September 17 at 10:00 AM Pacific. Each model's list is then shuffled once, everyone is emailed a reservation or waitlist result that day, and purchase emails start September 18 with a 72-hour window to check out. To qualify, your Steam account must be in good standing with a purchase made before April 27, 2026, and Valve allows one signup per household. Our reservation guide walks through each step, and the release date page has every key date.

Valve ships directly through Steam to the U.S., Canada, the UK, the EU, and Australia. Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong buy through KOMODO, Valve's authorized distributor, and South Korea follows later. The road here had slips. The November 2025 announcement targeted early 2026, which softened to first half by February, and in April Valve publicly said the memory crisis forced it to revisit both the shipping schedule and pricing. Summer 2026 was the version that stuck, and Valve made it with eight days of summer left.

Price: $1,059 and $1,299, power supply extra

Valve's stated goal in November 2025 was a headset cheaper than the $999 Index. The 256GB Kit landed at $1,059, and the 1TB Kit at $1,299. That is inside the $899 to $1,199 analyst range we tracked all summer, and $10 above the Steam Machine, which Valve priced at $1,049 after blaming DDR5 contract prices up more than 170% year over year. Three first-party accessories are sold separately, and only at checkout once you have a purchase email: a 45W power supply with a 2.5m cable ($29), the Ergonomic Accessories Kit with controller hand straps and battery doors, a top strap, and an extended light blocker ($59), and a replacement kit of the face gasket, head cushion, and standard light blocker ($49). Color passthrough is not built in; Valve lists the Arcturus Vision camera as a Steam Frame Compatible add-on for it, which UploadVR reports at $149, and Zenni makes the prescription inserts. Regional prices and the full signal history are on our Steam Frame price page, and our launch report breaks down what the money buys.

Specs at a glance

The streaming dongle is the whole thesis

Every wireless PC VR setup today fights your router. The Frame ships with a plug-and-play 6GHz wireless adapter that plugs into your PC and gives streaming its own link, and journalists who tried it at Valve's offices reported no perceptible lag. The launch page fills in the rest: one of the headset's two radios is dedicated to the stream while the other handles your Wi-Fi, Multi-Link Streaming routes data across every available connection at once, and Foveated Streaming uses eye tracking to put the best pixels where you are looking, which Valve says typically offers over a 10x improvement in image quality and effective bandwidth. Valve describes the Frame as streaming-first with standalone capability, not the other way around: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 runs the Steam library on-device through Proton and FEX when you are away from your PC, and the strict Steam Frame Verified program governs what earns the on-device badge. That standalone stack quietly graduated on August 10, when Valve's compat registry moved Proton 11.0 (ARM64) into the proton-stable slot held until then by experimental ARM64EC builds, and added Steam Linux Runtime 4.0 for arm64 as a required dependency. Even Meta is paying attention: CTO Andrew Bosworth singled out the wireless dongle as something Meta will learn from.

The launch game question

There is no new Half-Life moment. Road to VR reported at the announcement that a Steam Frame team member flatly denied Valve has any VR content in development, and ten months later the launch confirmed it. What Valve did instead was put the old one in the box: every Steam Frame includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx, redeemed in the headset's settings, one per device, and UploadVR reports Valve built a native 64-bit ARM version that runs standalone, with Steam Cloud saves shared between the headset and PC streaming. We wrote about what that does for the launch. Valve's bet is still that the library is the launch title: your entire Steam catalog over the wireless adapter, plus over 100 games Steam Frame Standalone Verified for on-device play. On the third-party side, Payday: Aces High was the first game to list Steam Frame as a platform, and titles like H3VR2 and Into the Radius 2 sit naturally in the launch window. We covered the stakes of shipping without a marquee exclusive in our launch-game reckoning.

Every Steam Frame development, dated

The full beat-by-beat record of our Steam Frame coverage, oldest to newest. The headset itself was announced in November 2025.