Steam Frame now redeems your free Half-Life: Alyx from the VR dashbar

Steam Frame owners can claim their free copy of Half-Life: Alyx without leaving the headset. Valve’s Steam Client release for Frame on September 22 “enabled free Half-Life: Alyx redemption from the account page on Frame”, and the notes tell you how to get there: “click your avatar from the VR dashbar to access your account page”.

Half-Life: Alyx comes with the Steam Frame, and the redemption now sits on the in-headset account page. Image: Valve

Valve says the build went to all users, so it is not a beta opt-in. The same release also changed the VR Quick Access Menu to open on click rather than on hover, which is the only other item in it.

Alyx is bundled with the headset, and Valve shipped a standalone ARM64 build of it that runs on the Frame without a PC. Redeeming the copy and running it are separate steps, and the September 22 change is about the first one.

A second client release targets flat-game streaming

Valve pushed another Steam Client build for Frame three days later. The notes are dated September 25 and went up at 00:22 UTC on September 26. Valve says it improves colour accuracy when streaming non-VR games from a Windows PC, which covers the Frame’s virtual-screen mode for flat Steam titles rather than VR games.

The same notes add support for a “Show Battery Percentage” option in the Dashboard Bar, and gamepad navigation in the Streaming menu. The battery readout is the change most owners will notice, since the first Steam Frame reviews singled out battery life as the headset’s weak point and an icon does not tell you how much is left.

Valve names Windows hosts only

What Valve does not say is what the colour problem was, by how much accuracy improved, or whether Mac and Linux hosts were affected at all. The line names Windows, there is no claim of HDR support anywhere in it, and there is no before-and-after figure to check.

The streaming stack under it has been moving quickly. Valve added the experimental Pyrowave codec to the desktop beta client on September 21, which trades bandwidth for latency and wants a wired network to be worth running.

Neither Frame client build needs the beta channel, and neither carries a version string in Valve’s notes, so there is nothing to check beyond restarting the client. Both went out to every Frame owner within three days of each other.

Alyx itself has had work of its own on the headset. Valve’s SteamOS 0.3.0 build for Frame, released to all users on September 17, lists “improved motion smoothing behavior in Alyx” alongside substantially faster charging while the unit is off or sleeping and a fix for a garbled-audio microphone bug.

If you bought a Frame and have not opened the account page inside it, that is where the free copy of Alyx is waiting.