Valve considered making a new VR game for the Steam Frame, before tackling the "ludicrous" task of getting Half-Life: Alyx running standalone

Valve have sometimes – if perhaps not often enough to call it a grand old tradition – massaged interest in their hardware by pairing the kit with a new game. For the Steam Deck it was Aperture Desk Job, and for 2019’s jammy sod of a VR headset, the Valve Index, it was Half-Life: Alyx, a full-length City 17 adventure that reviewer Graham (RPS in peace) called “a masterclass of first-person shooter design.”

Still, people rarely want to take the same class twice, hence why padding-compacted eyebrows have been raised by Alyx again being a tentpole of the new Steam Frame headset – this time, to showcase the game running in PC-less, standalone VR. Why not make something new, even a smaller tech demo like ADJ or the Index’s own The Lab collection of Portal-themed minigames?

According to Valve staff, several of whom I spoke to prior to the Frame’s Monday night launch, there were several reasons why a return to Alyx was considered more valuable – even though a brand new VR game was, at least briefly, on the table.

"We had talked about things like that," said SteamOS developer Pierre-Loup Griffais. "We decided to focus on just making sure the Steam catalogue as a whole would be a good experience, and trying to put most of our efforts into that compatibility. Because there's a tonne of existing experiences I think that can intro you to whatever side of the devices you're more interested in, right?"

Griffais refers to a key Steam Frame party trick: the ability to run both VR and flat games, from an existing Steam library, in the manner of your choosing, be it over conventional PC VR wireless streaming or standalone via the headset’s own internal hardware. "I mean, I can't speak for everyone here, but if I'm showing the headset to someone, something like SuperHot VR or Beat Saber or one of those OG titles is gonna get on there," he contined. "Because they're still so good, right? And I think there's a tonne of that catalogue that can actually serve as a good launch experience for most people because they maybe haven't played them yet."

Robin Walker, a Valve programmer and co-creator of Team Fortress 2, offers a different view: that the process of re-developing Alyx to both run and perform well on the Frame’s dinky processing parts, with all the software rejiggery that entailed, provided Valve with invaluable knowledge on how to get Frame games working better in general.

"When you're building a new piece of hardware and there's a whole bunch of new software in that software stack, and there's drivers and all that sort of stuff, having a clear target is incredibly useful for you to make the tradeoffs," Walker explained. "To be able to test, to experiment, try different approaches, and Alyx was a far, far more useful target for us there than The Lab would have been, just because of the goals of the product."

"It was so worth it," added engineer Autumn Aston, "to just do that work anyway because we found so much stuff. So many, y’know, bugs, performance things in the driver. It was like a great way to get everything like up to scratch for the whole [Frame] project."

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