It’s been around four years since the first rumours of Valve Deckard cropped up, giving us a window into the Steam company’s next-generation VR efforts. The lengthy wait might finally come to an end later this year according to a new leak, but you’ll need to pay a pretty penny for the pleasure.
Reliable news source Gabe Follower shared details of Valve’s plans on X, with several people confirming that the standalone headset is due by the end of the year. It should arrive with a $1,200 price tag, which undercuts Meta Quest Pro’s $1,500 MSRP but not recent discounts setting it below a grand. In usual Valve fashion, the aim is to “give the user the best possible experience without cutting any costs,” which also means selling the device “at a loss.”
The same rumour indicates that it’ll bring SteamOS to the virtual reality space, marking yet another step closer to the operating system breaking free from its handheld confines. This prompts worries that it’ll be a walled garden in the same respect as Meta’s Horizon, demanding first-party exclusivity, but Valve tends to be good at broadening its appeal.
One of its core features will allow you run anything that’s playable on Steam Deck without hooking it up to a PC. That doesn’t give us an indication of its true power, but something of a bottom-of-the-barrel baseline. For quadruple figures, I’d expect a little more oomph out of the box.
To coincide with the launch, Valve has a few games and/or demos on the way to demonstrate its capabilities. Generally, this has been a sore spot for most virtual and mixed reality enthusiasts, but there has been a shift over the past few years towards games that truly make use of the format. If they’re even half as good as Batman Arkham Shadow, and we know Valve’s capable of this thanks to Half-Life: Alyx, then it’s onto a winner.
Despite renders of its controller, codenamed Roy, there’s still much we don’t know about the device and anything we do isn’t concrete because it’s still a work-in-progress. Ideally, a headset of this price will feature good inside out and finger tracking, but only time will tell. It’s just nice to see Valve making a big hardware push after Steam Machines kicked the bucket. Follow Club386 on Google News to stay in the loop as and when rumours and leaks crop up.
