Steam now sells VR games that won't run on a PC, and Valve is fine with that

Two of the VR games that arrived on Steam with Steam Frame on September 14 will not run on a gaming PC at all, and Valve says that is allowed. Fast Travel Games' Action Hero and Halfbrick Studios' The Thrill of the Fight 2 run only in standalone mode on the headset, and Steam lists no Windows, Mac or Linux version of either.

The Steam version of The Thrill of the Fight 2 runs only in standalone mode on Steam Frame. Image: Halfbrick Studios

The Action Hero store page opens by announcing, in capitals, that the game is "exclusively on Steam Frame", and its only system requirement is Steam Frame. The Thrill of the Fight 2 page spells it out for PC VR owners: "The Steam version of the game currently supports Steam Frame standalone play only, and will not run on a Windows PC connected to a VR HMD."

Valve says a PC version is optional

For more than two decades, a Steam game has meant a PC game, so this is a real shift. Valve confirmed the policy in an email interview with Automaton published on September 15: "Partners who ship on Steam have the freedom to target any platforms they think make sense for their game and audience. There is no requirement that a game must have a PC target."

The developer documentation says the same in plainer language. Valve's guide to uploading APKs tells studios to tick Android under supported operating systems, and adds: "If this is an Android only app you will be editing the default depot." The headset runs those builds through Lepton, which Valve describes as "a compatibility layer that allows Android games to run on Linux", the base of SteamOS.

Quest ports are the quickest route onto the headset

The reasoning sits in Valve's compatibility notes for developers. "For VR developers that have already spent the effort to make a mobile optimized version of their game for other hardware (typically Android Arm64), we think it makes sense to run that version on Steam Frame," Valve writes. In VR, that other hardware is mostly Meta Quest, and the same page says Steam Frame runs on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, an Arm64 chip from Qualcomm's smartphone line.

Both games fit the pattern. Action Hero, Fast Travel Games' movie-themed shooter, launched on Meta Quest on December 12, 2024, according to Meta, and The Thrill of the Fight 2 promises "full crossplay with Meta Quest" on its Steam page. On Steam, Action Hero lists at $9.99 in the US and The Thrill of the Fight 2 at $19.99, both with launch discounts running, and both carry the Steam Frame Standalone Verified badge.

The economics explain the rest. Automaton's Nobuaki Shibuya, who says he has worked on VR games himself, writes in his notes to the interview that more than 90% of the copies sold of the VR games he has worked on came from Meta Quest, and less than 10% from Steam. He also writes that the VR games he found running comfortably on Steam Frame were almost all APK ports from Meta Quest. Those are his observations, not Valve's.

PC VR owners are left out for now

The catch is for people with a Valve Index or a Quest connected to a gaming PC. Both games appear in the Steam store like any other VR release, but neither will launch on a PC-connected headset.

That may change. Halfbrick's store text says "SteamVR PCVR is not yet supported", which leaves the door open without promising anything. Action Hero's page describes the game as exclusive to Steam Frame.

The shift runs in one direction only, since Steam Frame can still stream the whole PC library. That is the approach Valve set out in June, when it pitched Steam Frame as more than a wireless PC VR headset. In the US and Europe, purchase emails start on September 18 and no shipping date has been announced, so for now these are Steam games that almost no Steam user can play.