No Half-Life 3 for the Steam Frame, so it looks like this six-year-old game might be the key launch offering instead
Folks who pick up Valve's soon to be released VR headset, the Steam Frame, may get a free Half-Life game with their purchase. Unfortunately, I'm not talking about a brand new release. Plus, it may well be a game virtual reality gamers already have—Half-Life: Alyx.
Dataminer Brad Lynch unearthed this tidbit, sharing a screenshot of code strings that refer to a 'Frame Alyx Promo'. He also observed on X that Valve did a similar thing in the past, offering the game for free with purchases of the Index VR headset after the game launched. That all occurred, of course, quite a few years ago now.
Lynch also noted in an earlier post that internal branches of Alyx had been regularly updated since early last year, though "the public app is only just now starting to get those many months of staged updates." The implication is that these are optimisation tweaks specifically for the Steam Frame, though that's not been confirmed.
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Lynch is fairly reliable as a leaker regarding all things VR, having previously spotted that a number of SteamVR code components had been renamed 'Frames' shortly before the Steam Frame was fully revealed.
More recently, he spotted "the first 'official' Android app on Steam," which would make the most of all of Valve's work on its custom Android compatibility container for Linux, Lepton. Lynch also suggested back in June that the entire VR sphere may enjoy much better displays in the next few years, like Micro-OLEDs from Samsung.
So, no, it doesn't seem that Half-Life 3 is on the horizon, but I won't turn down a free copy of one of the best virtual reality games to come out in years. Mind you, the fact Alyx itself is already six years old probably says a lot about the state of VR these days.
While the Steam Frame is designed to play your entire non-VR library as well, given the lack of big releases in the niche, I personally won't be rushing out to buy a fresh virtual reality headset any time soon.
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