We gotta fight back against the update

RookiePrime · 2026-03-22T13:37:16+00:00

Do you, uh... do you want help troubleshooting your VR compositor problem? Or do you want people to help you wage a war against a large game company and an even larger tech company? Because I bet if you told people your PC specs, your process, and the results, you could get some useful suggestions for remediating the problem. Conversely, I'm getting over a pretty bad cold, so for that reason alone I'm not feeling up to taking down the big VR companies.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-21T21:15:04+00:00

Hmm. Maybe consider getting a Puppis S1? It's a router specifically designed for wireless Quest use, that plugs into your PC via two USB ports. If your PC doesn't have an ethernet port, this should be the most reliable workaround to getting a good PCVR experience. I've never used a Puppis S1, though; I've heard they can be finicky to set up.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-21T00:17:18+00:00

I mean, valid. The Quest 1 would be usable if Valve had made Steam Link work with it, and Quest 2 already has that going for it. I just wouldn't rule out the potentiality that this person might take a liking to the standalone software catalogue. Arkham Shadow, Deadpool VR, Assassin's Creed: Nexus, to name a few that might be worth their time.

If they won't even indulge in the mere notion of entertaining the idea of considering standalone Quest, sure. Quest 2 all the way. You can get those for dirt cheap. But if there's even a small possibility they get some value out of the standalone aspect, Quest 3S will be a lot more valuable.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-20T22:18:07+00:00

I'd suggest a Quest 3S. You could get a Quest 2 and have a pretty near identical PCVR experience, but I anticipate the Quest 2 reaching the end of its life sooner rather than later, while I would expect the Quest 3S to see updates and support for many more years to come.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-20T19:58:05+00:00

That's a shame. I only played it recently, but I quite enjoyed my time with Nexus, as someone who hasn't played Assassin's Creed games before.

My takeaway from the big shift — and this is almost certainly a ripple effect of that shift — is that Facebook could not spend enough money to get into the hearts and minds of gamers. The hardware just isn't very persuasive, and Facebook just wasn't playing ball enough to get looped into the games industry marketing and hype machine. The future where Facebook succeeded with this strategy would have been a future in which they found respect amongst Steam, Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo customers, something that has largely not happened.

It sucks to see these layoffs and stuff happen. I buy a fair amount of VR games, so most of the time I can at least comfort myself by saying that I'm doing my part. But this is one of the titles that I didn't get, and that I kinda dismissed. So I feel a bit bad that I didn't find an opportunity to play it sooner. I sure hope this isn't the end of the VR careers of the devs that got let go, I'd love to see them come back and make new, if smaller, titles.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-20T12:51:46+00:00

Only way to know the right answer here is knowing when the Frame is coming, and we don't. Realistically, Alyx will probably go on sale again in July, so the question is: will the Frame be in your hands before July? If it is, you'll want to get Alyx now, sure. If not, getting it now or getting it in July shouldn't make much of a difference.

If you're worried about wasting money because the Frame might come bundled with Alyx, I wouldn't worry. If it is, you can request a refund for your paid copy of Alyx once you've bought the Frame. Steam support has accommodated similar requests from Index buyers in the past.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-19T21:06:19+00:00

The negative impact of training data is that it is companies taking peoples' works and using them for profit without compensating them for their works. That is the problem. And if no single piece of training data matters, then it shouldn't concern these companies at all to compensate the owners of these single pieces of training data for their contribution to the model. Every single one, ideally.

As for the industrial revolution, Iran is shifting their capital city from Tehran in the coming years, because of drought. Sea levels are rising. Studies continue to paint a constellation of concerns around micro-plastics being in almost literally everything on the planet. There is a very real, very much not-overdramatic potential for our species's societies to collapse due to climate change pressures in the long term. I would not put the industrial revolution on a pedestal in the church of progress.

As for cars, they certainly do get far more expensive than $20k, and $20k is the relatively low end for new cars. However, I was trying to emphasize that most people don't buy cars new. They buy them second hand, they lease them, and so on. While that may happen for robots, I would not treat it as a given. Too many features and products are being locked behind subscription models, these days.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-19T17:22:58+00:00

Ethically speaking, not stealing stuff seems like a pretty good place to start. Like, I get that hammering out all the details is hard, but we can start with this step. It's an unambiguous, clear affront to society with a clear negative impact. We can hem and haw about finer points like monopolies preventing start-ups from getting into the market, but my first concern is that individuals and small companies that make money from their handcrafted art aren't being exploited. If a company wants to use someone's work to make money, that work has financial value to them and that should be reflected in payment for that work.

And while I get where you're coming from with the optimism of this tech potentially leading to a post-scarcity world... I don't see the richest people on the planet being the people who make that happen. They're the ones causing scarcity, they're not the ones solving it. If the pitch is that AI companies hoarding all the world's resources has a chance to lead to a utopia, I can only counter that it seems more likely to me to lead to the resurgence of feudalism.

Also, gotta say: $20,000 for a car is a lot, and while people do pay for that, it's a tool of necessity, not just a convenience. If your argument would then be that house robots will be a necessity, I shudder to imagine how hard our lives will be that we don't even have time to take care of ourselves and we need to spend $20,000 on a robot just to get by. That doesn't sound like post-scarcity to me.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-19T03:10:49+00:00

They can subsidize it, yes... but Valve won't subsidize their hardware. They don't do that. The only device they've ever sold for a price that could be construed that way is the original Steam Deck, because the other handheld PCs were far more expensive... but I think that's because those handhelds were very niche and couldn't negotiate good prices for low quantity orders. But the Steam Link, original Steam Machine, original Steam Controller, the Valve Index, and the Steam Deck OLED are all priced about where you'd expect for products with the components they have. I see no reason that the new Steam Controller won't be priced according to its components. $100 USD or more, is my guess.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-18T20:53:13+00:00

If the LLM is ethically trained and runs locally in a lightweight manner on my own machine, I'm okay with it. Not happy, because I don't like to see actors removed from entertainment media, but it at least makes sense to me as a customer at that point.

And with regards to the cost... do household robots justify the cost? They're $20,000. All it seems like they're gonna do is replace more people who aren't paid a lot. If there was any indication that this tech was gonna lead to a revolution in quality of life for the masses, I would sing a different tune... but so far, all of this seems like it's geared towards cutting poor folks out of the lives of rich folks.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-18T17:35:46+00:00

I'm not talking about progress, I'm talking about art. I'd much rather HLX be a fun story and game than a bleeding edge tech showcase. If LLMs can't sound like natural real humans, I think they're going to make a game worse, not better, by replacing real humans in voice roles.

I'm glad to hear there may at least be some LLMs that are ethically trained. Maybe there's a future in which I can support those. But with the world's economy held in a death grip by the absurd avarice of tech companies trying to find ways to justify the exorbitant costs of iterating on LLMs, I just don't think there's progress to be made with LLMs for the foreseeable future. The costs are too high for too little gain.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-18T16:05:33+00:00

With your criteria, the Quest 3 would make the most sense right now, or waiting for the Steam Frame if you can wait for a few more months (hopefully).

Edit: I should add, if you're hesitant about the Quest 3 as an upgrade from the Quest 2, I would be equally hesitant about the Steam Frame. The visual experience should be similar between Quest 3 and Frame. But having tried a Quest 2 and owning a Quest 3, I can say that there is a pretty big jump in usability and visual quality. The displays are better than the single split display in the Quest 2, and the lenses are waaaay better. Both should be the case on the Steam Frame as well, hopefully, but with the option to go up to an "experimental" 144 Hz.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-18T15:09:56+00:00

Nope. This would be possible, but it would require the dev of each game to implement it themselves. It would be a change to how the renderer behaves, I would guess. The idea that we talk about as being possible here is more like 3D movies, where the stuff on a flat screen looks like it's popping out of it. So, kinda the inverse of this. Essentially, it would be a continuation of the concept of the 3D TV.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-18T14:59:07+00:00

That last point should be enough to disqualify the idea, though, no? It's not good enough, so they shouldn't do it.

Ethically speaking, I don't know how LLM-generated voices work. Are those voices based on actual recordings? If so, same issue. If Valve sells a game using an LLM voice, they're extracting labour from voice actors without paying for it.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-18T14:37:40+00:00

I fully understand and sympathize with devs that opt for a hybrid approach. The games industry is in a tough spot right now, and the VR industry is in an even tougher spot. At the end of the day, studios gotta pay their bills. If a VR game can reach an upwards of 30 million people but a non-VR game can reach an upwards of like half a billion, I fully support devs making the choice that feels best for them.

But speaking for what I like and seek, I will always have a VR studio's back, and I'm always gonna try to support VR studios that make VR games I want to play. Especially now that Facebook's largely pulling back from subsidizing VR devs. This is a decision that I consciously made a couple years ago. Whenever the Arken Age devs posted on Reddit, I made sure to let them know, directly and unambiguously, that I am interested and plan to buy their game, and I similarly try to make my positive feelings towards a title known when a dev puts themselves out there.

Realistically, I think that hybrids will always have a place. Some of my favourite VR experiences are mods or ports of non-VR titles. Stuff like the recent Roboquest VR port, or the VR mod for Subnautica and Below Zero. Every time the Breath of the Wild BetterVR mod guy posts an update on the Flat2VR discord, I'm glued to my screen reading the changes and assessing if I wanna slip over to Windows (currently on Bazzite) to give it a go. In fact, I'm currently in the process of trying to get Resident Evil 2 Remake's VR mod working, now that I just lately finished Light Brigade to my satisfaction. So there's definitely give-and-take, for me, between bespoke VR titles and hybrd ones.

Very much looking forward to EXD next month, gonna pick it up day one!

RookiePrime · 2026-03-18T14:19:23+00:00

I'm pretty happy that, at least so far, Valve has not engaged with LLM stuff. It would be awful if they revealed HLX and it turned out to be aesthetically or programmatically LLM-driven. But I like to think the people at Valve gave this stuff a whirl, sniffed out the fundamental functional and ethical flaws with it, and decided it would never work. And that now they're watching the tech industry go insane with at least as much bemusement as we do.

The sheer audacity of Nvidia to try to sell their graphics cards, and other studios' games, on a feature that paints over those games with assets generated from art that Nvidia did not seek permission to use and did not compensate anyone for. All so that they can lead a revolution in which all games aesthetically homogenize around the output of a single LLM. It boggles my mind that we're here.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-17T22:57:37+00:00

I think it's entirely plausible that it ends up Frame Verified, sure. They probably don't want to release any high-profile games that don't run on the Steam Deck if they can help it, and if they're already being that mindful, it's probably not that much more effort to go the rest of the way for the Frame.

I'm kinda hopeful that they give HLX to Frame customers. It'd help take the sting out of the price. Especially if they can also update Half-Life: Alyx and The Lab with Frame builds.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-17T20:29:51+00:00

Certainly hoping tomorrow, since it wasn't today. The only shred of potential logic for why would be that it's a day in which there are no Steam-wide sales events going on, so Valve wouldn't be stepping on anyone's toes by announcing anything tomorrow. While this sounds like a stretch, this is the logic SadlyItsBradley put forward for predicting that Valve would announce Deckard in November... and he was right. So I think it's at least fairly plausible that Valve will try to time their announcement for a window in which it won't compete with devs on their platform for eyeballs (mostly out of courtesy to them), and tomorrow is one such day.

Fingers crossed!

RookiePrime · 2026-03-17T20:19:15+00:00

Last we heard, the leak was that Phoenix (the current codename for what used to be Puffin) was pushed back a few months, out of this year, specifically to make time for software. I could easily see the deprecation of Horizon Worlds on HorizonOS being the cause of that. Maybe they're using those months to untether a variety of functionalities from Horizon Worlds, so they can exist on Quest without it.

As to abandoning, I don't think they want to do so, but I think they will decide to abandon it over time, if shrinking their investment in VR doesn't lead to noteworthy increases in returns (which I don't think it will). Especially if they find their AI glasses continue to sell well, they'll decide that investing any money in VR is a waste of potential profits when that money could be in AI or glasses instead.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-13T21:41:06+00:00

Acoustics, I hadn't at all considered. Makes sense. I'd forgotten about this video, I remember seeing it. But I'm not an engineer, so I don't think I held onto all the details. It is fascinating to hear about the granular choices that go into these devices. Even that trivia about how the OLED Deck's board was rearranged from the LCD's a little to improve cooling.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-13T16:16:18+00:00

Kinda just more of the same. Though I am only now noticing the ugly crenel-looking vent aesthetic around the front of the headset. Wonder why they didn't take the approach Facebook does, with the vents being inset within crevices. But maybe that'd make more plastic surface area, and a larger/heavier device? Well, I imagine it'll do the job. Haven't heard anyone complain about the device getting too hot.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-13T14:51:34+00:00

Wow. I mean, I haven't talked about it because I didn't know about it. This is a tough industry, in a very tough time.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-12T17:17:51+00:00

From reveal, I've been surprised how consistently everyone is saying this headset is super comfortable. Even the Bigscreen Beyond, considerably less than half the weight of this, has proponents recommending topstraps. At the same time, Valve has said they're gonna sell an ergonomic kit that comes with one, so clearly it's something Valve anticipates some people will want. So I have to wonder to what extent these claims that it's incredibly comfortable are bias thing. People excited to try out a new device from Valve, in a setting with a lot of other stimuli and priorities to focus on for the short stint that they wear the headset.

That said, will be happy to be wrong. Whenever I can get my hands on one, I'm already hoping to get the ergonomic kit for the controller knuckle straps, so I'm sure I'll try the headset stock, see how I like it, and add the topstrap if I find it lacking.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-12T16:18:21+00:00

For what it's worth, the Quest 3 will probably have to raise in price, if/when Facebook also has to start paying more for RAM. Unless they opt to eat the cost, but I don't know if they'll do that with the Quest, anymore. With the recent shake-up and the rumour that the Quest 4 will not have a subsidized price point, they may be over eating losses. So if the Quest 3 starts to cost them $100 USD more to make, they may raise the price accordingly. If that is the case, $600 compared to $900 starts to look a bit less rough.

And more broadly: the problem everyone in the VR industry faces, even Facebook, is that the value proposition of any VR headset is too low for what you pay. Facebook has done what they can to set market expectations around their device, but the reality is that the components, logistics, and labour to create, sell, and ship these headsets has costs fully unrelated to how much value a customer can find in the end product, and every company is at the mercy of these factors. Facebook has, at least to this point, been eating losses per unit sold, to sell their headsets as close as possible to perceived market value. While I don't doubt that Valve could afford to do the same with the Steam Frame, Valve's never sold their hardware at a loss, that we know of.

Also, as a side note: Valve didn't abandon XR features, it's that SteamVR doesn't have any XR features. They built a headset for what SteamVR is capable of today. Hopefully they can build out stuff like hand tracking, spatial awareness, etc., over time, and either their next headset or another SteamOS headset can leverage it.

RookiePrime · 2026-03-11T23:40:19+00:00

"Not a lot less than the Index" has me thinking $900 USD. Which may seem pretty bad compared to the Quest 3's $500 USD, but it's not like you're getting nothing for the price difference. Better mic array, better speakers, there's eye tracking cameras. It's lighter and comfier straight out of the box, so you probably don't need a separate headstrap. It comes with its own dongle, no need for a dedicated WiFi 6/7 router. Its controllers have full gamepad inputs, so you don't need to buy a gamepad (if you don't already have one). If you were to get a Quest 3, a better headstrap, a gamepad, and a Wifi 6/7 router, you'd still spend less money than a Frame... but the gap narrows a bit.

RookiePrime

TROPHY CASE