Valve Steam Frame

The Steam Frame gets a whole lot right. It's comfortable and straightforward. Above all else, it's convenient. It's admittedly a tough sell as an upgrade to a Quest 3, or as someone's first step into VR when other options are much cheaper, but the Steam Frame is the best all-round VR headset I've used to date. After weeks of non-stop virtual reality testing, it's the headset I keep reaching for when I'm off the clock.

The Steam Frame is probably one of the first VR headsets that can do everything right out of the box, from standalone gaming to streaming 2D games from your PC. But the high price, short battery life and some software glitches stop it from dethroning the much-cheaper Meta Quest 3.

Lightweight design and a trick wireless strategy make the Steam Frame a top-notch VR gaming experience.

While the Steam Frame is ultimately a solid standalone VR experience, it's hard to stomach its exorbitant price, as well as the fact that it's arriving far too late to inject much life into the declining state of VR. At the very least, Valve can blame the Frame's high cost on the AI RAM crisis, which is something Sony couldn't really do with the PS VR 2. If it somehow gets cheaper, or if developers start to produce a ton of must-play VR content, I might reassess the Steam Frame. For now, though, it just feels like a wasted opportunity.

The Steam Frame plays VR and 2D games wonderfully, through the power of its own hardware and class-leading wireless streaming, but you'll need to pay a pretty penny to don this headset.