What just happened? Valve has filed trademarks for what will likely be its next major gaming release. "Steam Frame" could refer to the company's SteamOS console, codenamed Fremont, or it may be a reference to a multi-format gaming platform. But others say it is the product name for the successor to the Valve Index headset, aka Deckard.

Valve has filed two trademarks at the US Patent and Trademark Office. One covers "Computer game consoles for recreational game playing," along with accessories such as controllers.

The second filing applies to "categories of computer hardware," including networks, peripherals, and "computer software for the reproduction, processing, and streaming of audio, video, data, text, and multimedia content."

Many people think that Steam Frame could be Valve's SteamOS-powered console, codenamed Fremont. The device first surfaced in a Steam Deck kernel update in December before appearing on Geekbench in August.

However, Bread Lynch (@SadlyItsBradley on X), the original Fremont leaker, writes that after datamining Valve's SteamVR Beta, he believes The Steam Frame will be the official name of the Deckard VR device.

Lynch says that Deckard/Steam Frame's biggest selling point will be its use of spatial gaming, meaning games that are aware of and use the physical 3D environment, blending digital objects into real space for a more immersive and interactive experience. This is enabled through advanced inside-out tracking and could also incorporate full-body tracking for even deeper immersion.

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While the new headset appears to be the most likely device to be called The Steam Frame, it could be a term for a new platform from Valve: there's mention of a Frame Store in the Steam VR beta.

Whatever the Steam Frame is, we're expecting Valve's headset to arrive before the company's console hits the market. Releasing both this year might be optimistic, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility – especially with the holidays approaching.

Valve looked like it would never return to the home console market after the disaster that was the Steam Machine, but the Steam Deck and SteamOS Linux distro have proved big hits, with the latter being used by third-party developers such as Lenovo.

According to the Geekbench entry, Fremont has a six-core chip from the Hawk Point 2 family – that's the Ryzen 8000G desktop APUs, Ryzen 8040 mobile, and Ryzen 200 mobile chips, all of which use Zen 4 cores. The semi-custom APU may have its iGPU removed and use a dedicated Radeon RX 7600 series GPU.