Valve is readying as much as take the battle to Meta’s Quest lineup and Sony’s PlayStation VR2, with its upcoming wi-fi Steam Body VR headset. Valve leaker Tyler McVicker, in a now-deleted YouTube stream, claimed that the machine will begin above the $1,000 mark, which might make it some of the costly gaming VR headsets in the marketplace.
When the headset was introduced final November, the corporate claimed it might be priced under its predecessor, the $999 Valve Index. If this leak holds up, evidently surging element costs, significantly for RAM and SSDs, might trigger Valve to cost the Steam Body a lot increased than it initially supposed. It would not be an unfamiliar story for Valve, after it launched the Steam Machine earlier this yr at a beginning worth of $1,049 – round $300 greater than it initially deliberate, with that rise additionally attributed to rising reminiscence and storage prices.
Whereas a four-figure price ticket could seem eye watering, there’s one thing else to contemplate. Whereas different gaming-capable headsets such because the Meta Quest 3 could also be cheaper on paper, the lower-level {hardware} means they’re typically restricted to much less demanding video games, except hooked as much as a standalone PC. The Steam Body then again, will not must piggy again off a gaming PC for a lot of titles. It runs natively on SteamOS, and has highly effective {hardware} baked into the headset, corresponding to a 4nm Snapdragon ARM64 chip and 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM.
For these x86-based titles that are incompatible with the Steam Body, it may be attached wirelessly to a PC by way of an included 6GHz wi-fi adapter, permitting in your complete Steam library to be performed by way of the headset.
Valve introduced the Steam Body in November 2025, and promised a summer season 2026 launch for its newest VR headset. Nevertheless, with the top of summer season getting nearer, we would anticipate to get remaining affirmation on pricing very quickly. There’s loads of indicators that Valve are readying up for an imminent launch, corresponding to a brand new web page on the Steam Retailer which lists video games that are ‘Nice on Body’ – corresponding to Portal 2 and Hades.
