Steam Frame controllers now act as a gamepad in VR games with no VR input. Three betas needed.
Steam Frame controllers now feed gamepad input to VR games that never supported VR controllers, and owners do not have to ask for it. SteamVR beta 2.18.3, posted on October 10 at 00:50 UTC, says under a Steam Frame heading: "By default, Steam Frame controllers will now use gamepad input in VR games that don't support VR inputs."
A Steam sign-in screen from Valve's Steam Frame videos. The new default needs the Steam client beta and the SteamVR beta on the PC as well as the beta channel on the headset. Image: Valve
There is a catch, and Valve states it plainly: "Requires Steam Beta and SteamVR Beta." Valve shipped the change to a beta on both sides of the link, and nothing about it reaches a Frame on the default channel.
Three opt-ins for one default
Valve described the change twice in eight minutes, and the second version is the more exact. The Steam client beta note, which Valve titles "October 9th" by its own Pacific clock and published at 00:42 UTC on October 10, ends the same wording differently: "Note: both Frame and the PC must be on the beta channel for Steam and SteamVR". That is three opt-ins for one default: the headset on the Frame beta channel, the Steam client beta on the PC, and the SteamVR beta on the PC.
None of the three is close to a stable release. On Valve's SteamVR news feed, read at 21:36 UTC on October 10, the newest stable announcements are still "Introducing SteamVR 2.17" from September 10 and "SteamVR Hotfix 2.17.10" from September 18, and every 2.18 post since carries the title "SteamVR Beta Updated". Valve names no date for that changing.
Valve wants to hear which games it breaks
The override is per game, in either of two places. Valve writes: "The preferred mode can be changed for any VR game in either the game's Steam Input settings or in VR Controller settings on the Now Playing page." Steam Input is the layer doing the work, the same one that maps controllers for the rest of the Steam library.
Then comes the request: "Please report any titles that do not work out of the box." Valve does not define which games count as lacking VR input support, names no title that gains from the change, and gives no example of one that fails. It also says where to take a fault, and it is not the replies to its own post: "Replies to this post are not tracked for bug reporting purposes", with owners pointed at the SteamVR Bug Report forum and asked to attach a system report.
The same build carries one other change for anyone remapping controls, and it reads like a companion to the new default: "Fixed an error when saving new bindings when an application does not have any default set."
A large back catalogue, and no list of it
The change is scoped to VR games rather than flat ones, which puts it in front of a part of Steam that predates every modern headset. PC VR titles from the early Vive and Rift years shipped with gamepad support and nothing else, and a Frame owner opening one has had two controllers in hand doing nothing useful. Valve has not published a list of the titles the new default applies to, and asks owners for the ones it breaks instead. It has been filling in what the Frame can and cannot run title by title since the headset shipped.
Valve has been working through Steam Input faults on the desktop side too, including two separate causes of a blank controller configurator. This one runs the other way: an input mode switched on for a class of games Valve has not listed, with the report button pointed back at owners.
