Valve’s Steam Deck for Your Face Is Way More Interesting Than a Quest Clone

The consensus is clear. Regular folk and gamers alike couldn’t give a hoot for yet another Meta Quest-like VR headset. Hell, even the “metaverse is the future” company Meta seems more interested in smart glasses than headsets nowadays. That may change if Valve has anything to say about it. Even if you’re not a VR gaming enthusiast, there’s more than one reason you should pay attention to Valve’s long-rumored wireless XR headset. The company behind Steam could be crafting a device whose closest description is “a Steam Deck for your face.”

Microsoft and Meta—strange bedfellows indeed—recently teamed up to sell an Xbox-ified version of the Meta Quest 3S. Despite the name “Xbox Edition,” the mixed reality headset could not play your Xbox games without relying on streaming. Valve could be cooking up something purpose-built for Steam gaming that’s not the rumored “Fremont” console or a Steam Deck 2. VR and Valve rumormonger Brad Lynch spent last week posting about all the developments surrounding “Deckard,” which was reportedly the internal name given to the Half-Life maker’s upcoming VR headset.

Last week, records showed Valve recently applied to trademark “Steam Frame”—a name akin to the Steam Deck handheld PC. That could be an indicator of how Valve plans to push this new device. It’s a means of sticking your Steam library right in front of your eyes. Lynch suggested each game could be played in a separate “frame,” à la the Apple Vision Pro with its floating windows for your apps.

Unlike the Valve Index from 2019, this headset won’t require Base Stations or wires hooked up to your TV. Based on the leaked documents and other rumors, the headset should be able to play VR games natively. What’s more important is how it will handle all those games that don’t support the chip microarchitecture that will supposedly power the new hardware. Most games run on x86-based microarchitecture. Rumors suggest that Valve could stick with an ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 or something equivalent. It’s the same chip inside the Meta Quest 3. To make them compatible, Valve would need to create a compatibility layer from x86 to ARM.

Valve already has experience with compatibility layers. Its Proton software takes a Windows game and makes it compatible with Linux for the Steam Deck. In the few years since the release of Steam Deck and Proton, the share of gamers on Linux has trended up based on Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey. The ARM layer could prove much, much more significant. The huge number of ARM-based mobile devices, and now a selection of Qualcomm ARM chips for laptops, means players could have more options to take their Steam games everywhere without needing to rely on streaming. Valve has reportedly been testing this ARM compatibility layer since at least 2024.

Those who play VR games on the Quest 2, Quest 3, or Quest 3S are already well aware of Steam Link or other streaming apps that help you connect to a PC for playing PC VR-exclusive titles. So why bother? In an interview with Gamertag VR, Lynch said the headset will have pancake lenses rather than the cheaper Fresnel lenses of the Quest 3S and odd devices like the HTC Vive Focus Vision.

Lynch claimed the new controllers, dubbed “Roy,” are no longer in the prototype phase. Lynch’s 3D mockups—which he says are the final render model for the controllers—seem very close to Meta’s Touch Plus controllers, though with all the face buttons located on the right-hand controller. Valve’s original Index controllers were packed with 87 individual sensors to identify the location of your hand and each individual finger. The Quest manages to do more with less thanks to more advanced hand-tracking from the headset itself. None of that matters if the available software doesn’t take any of the more specific hand-tracking into account.

The Valve Roy controllers are no longer marked as prototypes/EV1 in the drivers

Here is what the final rendermodels look like inside of SteamVR pic.twitter.com/bnjus8y99e

— SadlyItsDadley (@SadlyItsBradley) September 4, 2025

If Valve releasing Half-Life: Alyx, the first Half-Life game in more than a decade, couldn’t bring VR gaming into the mainstream, then how would a sequel headset—even one that won’t have you tangled up in wires—possibly perform better? You have to remember why Valve makes hardware in the first place. So long as it funnels players toward Steam, then it’s worth the company iterating on VR. Even if the new headset doesn’t succeed, its software compatibility layer will increase the number of devices that can run the company’s game launcher.