GoKawiilPrior to the official launch of the Steam Frame, Tom's Hardware Premium had a chance to talk with Valve engineers Jeff Leinbaugh and Pierre-Loup Griffais. We discussed the development process behind the Steam Frame, the standalone and streaming modes, networking strategy, and pricing, which you can read in its entirely here. You can find excerpts from this full transcript in our earlier story, and you can read the review here.
Like previous Valve launches, you can also read transcripts of our interviews with the company on the Steam Machine and Steam Controller.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
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Brandon Hill, Tom's Hardware: What were your goals in creating the Steam Frame and providing the framework necessary to support it, compared to legacy hardware like the Index?
Jeff Leinbaugh, Valve: Yeah, so the work started on Steam Frame basically as soon as we shipped the Index. And so we did a lot of exploration into technologies and features and use cases to try to answer that question. And the goals that we aligned on for what became the Steam Frame was to make [it] much easier to use, which to us meant lighter, more comfortable, easier to get into and out of VR headset.
That was a better way to interact with your whole Steam library than the goals we had for the Index. Where the Index was just: we wanted to make the best possible VR headset that we could make. And that came with a lot of compromises, which were worth it because they allowed us to have this really great VR headset and see what that was capable of.
But this time around we thought we could achieve something that was a lot more comfortable, a lot more accessible. And so streaming technology was a big part of that. So the headset can be wireless so that there's not a lot of complicated setup to get to the game, whether that's playing on the headset or streamed.
And then the other big part of that accomplishing that goal was making it possible to interact with Steam just like you would on a Steam Deck and to be able to play games that don't even support VR in a virtual display. So what we want to be possible is for somebody to put on the headset, browse their Steam library, and then just pick something that they want to play and not worry about too much else.
And that's kind of where all the user experience goals, at least, came from around this. And then there's a lot of other technical goals that support that we can get into if you're interested in any of those.
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