Valve announced the specific criteria for VR titles to receive the 'Steam Frame Verified' label on the Steam store.
Steam Frame is marketed by Valve as a "PC streaming first" product, primarily meant for gaming PC owners, but it also supports fully standalone play without a PC, just like a Meta Quest or Pico headset.
David Heaney
The challenge with Steam Frame as a standalone experience, however, is that it accesses the regular Steam store, and the vast majority of VR content on Steam is designed to run on a powerful gaming PC that draws hundreds of watts from mains power.
Steam Frame is slightly more powerful than Quest 3, with around 30% more GPU power and eye tracking that can drive foveated rendering in supported titles. But it's still significantly less powerful than a PC, due to running on a mobile chipset powered by a battery. While Steam Frame can run almost any VR title on Steam, it can't run the majority well.
Since Steam Frame was announced, dozens of VR game developers have been working to optimize their titles to run standalone on Valve's headset. Some are repurposing their Quest or Pico builds, leveraging the fact that Steam Frame can run Android APKs, while others are building a lower graphics tier than their current lowest.
For buyers of Steam Frame who want to use the headset standalone, Valve intends to make it easy to find titles optimized to run on Steam Frame by adding a 'Steam Frame Verified' label to those that it has tested and found to run well. It's a continuation of its strategy with Steam Deck, which has a 'Steam Deck Verified' label.
At GDC 2026, Valve revealed the specifics behind what a game will need to do to earn the Steam Frame Verified label.
The label will apply to both VR and flatscreen titles. For standalone VR, the title must run at 90 FPS, while standalone flatscreen games need to run at 720p 30FPS at minimum.
Valve's 90 FPS VR requirement is far stricter than the Meta Horizon Store or Pico Store, which both allow 72 FPS VR titles. The PlayStation Store allows 60FPS reprojected to 120Hz as the minimum.
David Heaney
In VR, a higher frame rate reduces the feeling of sickness that some people experience. And below 90 FPS, with the kind of low persistence displays needed for VR headsets, many people can see a distinct flicker in the periphery of the image for bright scenes. Valve is thus prioritizing the user experience over having as many Steam Frame Verified titles as possible – a fascinating move.
Still, getting VR content built for a powerful gaming PC to run at 90 FPS on a 10-watt mobile chipset from late 2023 will be no easy feat for developers, and for some it will be a downright impossible task.
It's a reminder of Valve's "PC streaming first" positioning for the product, and that the company is sticking to the values the industry established in early 2014, when both Oculus and Valve declared that 90Hz was the minimum bar for high-quality VR.
David Heaney
The looming question remains, of course: when will Steam Frame actually launch? Last month Valve announced that it needs to "revisit" its "exact shipping schedule and pricing" amid the global memory shortage, though the company said its goal is still to ship in the first half of this year.
