Valve's new Steam Frame headset ships with a free copy of Half-Life: Alyx, having ported the acclaimed 2020 VR game to run natively on the device's ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen 3 chip. This is notable because the game originally demanded a VR-capable Windows PC with a midrange graphics card, so getting it running on hardware closer to a smartphone chip, without stripping out assets or objects, is a significant technical achievement that also benefits from full mod and custom-level support.

Valve credits the Steam Frame's eye-tracking cameras and foveated rendering, which sharpens only the area a user is looking at to save processing power, alongside 16GB of VRAM, as the "silver bullet" that made the native port possible without degrading gameplay. The work reportedly took a year of extra development within the Vulkan drivers and SteamVR, and because most of it wasn't specific to Alyx, it should benefit other games on the $1,059 headset too. Despite this, Valve has given no indication it plans to make a new VR title, having previously said no new VR content was in development as of 2025, though rumours persist that Half-Life 3 is being actively worked on.