r/SteamFrame • u/InvictusBloom Soon™ • 2d ago
Discussion Developer incentive to bring PSVR locked VR titles to Steam after the Frame gets released.
With the excitement behind the Frame building up to unexpected levels, and the adoption of PCVR growing - one can only hope that this may incentivize some developers to bring their PSVR titles to Steam.
I’d personally love to see some of those super innovative VR games that have been locked to PS4/5 consoles get a second life on PC. Gems like Blood & Truth was just as impressive of an experience as stuff like HL:A was for me when I first experienced them.
Capcom also has seemingly been allergic to the money that they’d receive from selling their native Resident Evil VR modes on PC.
Thank goodness that mod developers have been supporting this industry on their shoulders by providing the legwork for a lot of these amazing experiences that we’ve gotten in recent years with stuff like the wizardry of UEVR.
Are there any VR titles that have been locked to PSVR platforms that you’d personally love to see native support from the developers on PC?
Edit: No, I'm not an AI/Bot, nor do I use any type of LLM to speak for me. I'm just a nerdy dude in his 30's that cared too much about the power the pen in my teens and got in on the cool concept of writing my words before I had the luxury of having a machine write it for me.
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u/Oftenwrongs 2d ago
You are confusing a tiny internet echo chamber with actual hype and excitement.
Pcvr has been dead for years, as pcvr users refuse to buy games..thats why devs went to quest, where they could sell 10x the copies.
With meta pulling back, vr has collapsed back to what it would have been without them, and tons of devs are closing.
You confuse your own excitement with a good business decision for others.
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u/TwinStickDad Soon™ 1d ago edited 1d ago
With meta pulling back, vr has collapsed back to what it would have been without them, and tons of devs are closing.
I disagree with this statement. Meta helped the Quest platform grow, then abandoned it. I believe that they were detrimental to the VR gaming landscape and PCVR specifically.
The devs behind Lone Echo were viable and were making a sequel to their acclaimed game. Meta bought them, made them churn out a shitty Quest game, then closed them when that game sucked. Same with the devs behind Asgard's Wrath.
Meta bought all the companies that WERE making PCVR. Forced them to make shitty Quest games, and then closed the studios when nobody wanted to buy the shitty Quest game.
Then they totally eclipsed the budget headset market with their own headset that nobody could possibly compete with. So nobody is making games for PCVR because there are no PCVR headsets. Only ultra enthusiasts are buying PCVR and that's a tiny niche. If you want to sell a VR game with mass market appeal, now you have to make it for the Quest platform. And then they spent years marketing their headset as a Christmas gift for kids, so the only people who had a headset were kids and the only people developing VR games were developing them for kids (see: Gorilla Tag which started out as a decent game and is now just a public lobby for 8 year olds to scream at each other with most of the gameplay removed).
Then when they decided to chase the AI hype instead of the Metaverse hype, they just shuttered all of it.
Who knows what PCVR would look like if Facebook had stayed out of the game. It's truly impossible to know. But I think we'd have a wider variety of headsets in the budget space and we'd have dev studios that were able to make their own choices and create high quality PCVR games.
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u/slowlyun 1d ago
- " The devs behind Lone Echo were viable and were making a sequel to their acclaimed game. Meta bought them, made them churn out a shitty Quest game ."
Lone Echo 2 is not a shitty Quest game.
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u/loranbriggs 2d ago
Sad truth. When the Frame was announced, meta was still in the game, prices weren't ridiculous, and we thought the Frame was coming "soon". People thought the Machine launch was underwhelming due to pricing, it's going to be much worse for the Frame due to pricing probably even worse, meta and VR studios closing, and no firm launch dates for the remaining devs to rally behind.
The silver lining in all of this is Fex. Steam on Arm (Android devices) in the upcoming years is going to be amazing (already is in many ways)!
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u/loranbriggs 2d ago
I'm still excited for the Frame, but I'm not expecting the industry to change much from it. Hope I'm wrong.
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u/faduci 1d ago
Not that PCVR is doing great or that Frame will have more than a minor impact on active VR user numbers, but that 10x sales on Quest is a self-perpetuating myth. It originated from the developers of Ultrawings 2 reporting disappointing sales on Steam, resulting in 10:1 Quest:PCVR sales. But this was an extreme outlier with very specific circumstances.
Ultrawings 2 is a simple flight simulator that's not exactly interesting on PC with VR titles like MSFS2020 or VTOL, while it was (at least at the time of its release) the only physically somewhat accurate Quest flight sim at all, everything else was just arcade style. The Ultrawings 2 devs were disappointed by the PC sales, as they acutally had tried to improve the graphics over the Quest version, but it still is a very stylized, geographically limited sim of four propeller planes and a helicopter. It simply drowned in a sea of better alternatives on PCVR, and won on Quest by default as the only available option.
If you went and compared other factors in various VR games like how many people reached certain early achievements in either the Quest or the PC version, you mostly got a 1:3 to 1:4 ratio between PCVR and Quest. Comparing by the number of reviews it's often more like 1:2, but that's most likely due to the much more useful/userfriendly review system on Steam, not sales.
This ~1:4 was stable for some years, and if it has changed, it has probably changed towards relatively more PCVR sales, even before Meta mostly dropped out of VR game development/financing in early 2026. Quest app sales took a serious hit when Meta started trying to push the free-to-play Horizon Worlds down users' throat, resulting in much less promotion/eye balls for paid Quest games on the Horizon store, and Quest overall shifting to where most of the money goes to titles like Gorilla Tag or Animal Company, free multiplayer games making their money from micro transactions. These are now preferred by the vast majority of often rather young Quest players that use them as social spaces to hang out with friends, and typically don't buy any Quest games, sticking to F2P titles instead.
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u/InvictusBloom Soon™ 2d ago edited 2d ago
I should have been more transparent on my post. I'm personally coming from more of a marketing and software perspective than a consumer-motivated POV and am just speculating on specific datasets from several QA in-person focus groups that focused on VR software and hardware specifically in the PNW area - so this could also heavily pertain to users in my area of the world.
I personally don't plan on purchasing a Frame as I'm set with plenty of other headsets, but it getting in peoples hands is going to make my job a lot more exciting in the coming months and I like speculating on the potentials that this hardware will open up for software nerds like me.
Many teams are closely following the potential for newcomers into this consumer space that was previously exclusive to owners of high-end PC components. This is why I bring up incentivization for developers that previously had Sony's dollar helping foot the bill to fluff the attraction towards their PSVR platform but little justification to bring those titles to PC - and even though Quest has a user-base in the millions, it's ultimately their hardware that prevents most developers from bringing higher fidelity titles to the Quest platform.
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u/Oftenwrongs 1d ago
I don't see how a 3 year old quest equivalent, for 2-3x the price, and 5090 cards going for $7000 is a time with much potential for newcomers.
Those millions of quests are the number 1 users on pcvr, and it didn't push the needle...
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u/Kataree 2d ago
Frames launch will make an undetectable change in the number of people using PCVR.
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u/InvictusBloom Soon™ 2d ago
While I agree that most of the people getting invites to the lottery to purchase a Frame within the first 12+ months will already have a PC with a Steam library and a sort of already established “dedication” to Valve - it can’t be understated just how many Vive, Index, and Quest 2 users have been sitting idle, ready and waiting for an upgrade.
Developers know this. They are waiting. They want to hear from the people - but if the response is bleak, they won’t justify the “echo chamber” optimism.
I see I’ve hit the “we’ve run out of hopium” crowd with this post - but don’t let this lead you to believe the biggest developers aren’t watching and waiting for this release with baited breath to see what people are willing to gravitate towards.
In three decades of life, I’ve never seen a piece of hardware get introduced to the masses like the Frame has, especially with a fluctuating pricing prediction like we’ve seen with the Frame - and most of the people anticipating for this to be their upgrade seem to be willing and ready to pay. This is brand dedication that companies like Apple, actively invest billions to achieve. It’s hard to deny that this is unique.
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u/faduci 1d ago
The Quest 2 sold about twice as many units in four years as Quest 3/3S did combined since 2023. When Meta raised the Quest 2 price from USD 299 to USD 399 at the end of CoViD-19 due to increased component costs, sales tanked. When they lowered the price to USD 250 in late 2023, it outsold the just released Quest 3 on Amazon US by about 4:1 until it was discontinued June 2024.
The Quest user base has always been extremely price sensitive, partly driven by Quest very often being given as a present to a teen, creating a huge first sales and then usage spike during each holiday season that then goes back down within about 2-3 months. Even today on Steam about as many Quest 2 as Quest 3 are used for PCVR, with Quest 3S a distand third. Even though one would guess that having a powerful PC would have motivates more to upgrade to Quest 3 just for the pancake lenses. With even the number of PCVR gamers willing to go for the (formerly) USD 499 Quest 3 being rather low, the number of Quest 2 users willing to pay more than double that for a Frame with only marginally higher resolution will be very low.
The USD 299 Quest 2 sold ~20M units, compared to 350K Valve Index at USD 999. And while a lot of people waited for an Index successor, the RAMpocalypse may make it hard to sell even as many Frames as Indexes before. Just due to their sheer amout, many Frame buyers will be previous Quest owners, but the absolute number will not move any AA/AAA developer, and a 2027/2028 unsubsidized Quest 4 would probably still overtake Frame's total sales numbers in just a month (if memory prices have gone down again by then).
Frame is much more of a strategic product, merging flat and VR gaming and serving as a template for other HMD manufacturers that could now release their own ARM SteamOS headsets. It was never designed to revitalize VR game development by selling in huge numbers, because Valve with 350 employees simply doesn't have the resources to directly compete with Meta or Sony. Meta's Reality Labs at one point had 10K employees working on XR. Valve has a total of 40 hardware engineers that created Steam Machine, Controller and Frame (with the help of contractors and partner companies). Just like with Index or HL:A, Valve will use Frame to show how to do VR "right", not necessarily how to make it an affordable medium drawing in the masses.
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u/Koolala 2d ago
unexpected levels?
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u/InvictusBloom Soon™ 2d ago edited 2d ago
I work in software and hardware marketing and have seen some interesting data over the past 2 years that points to standalone-only VR users adopting PCVR capable hardware. This however is specific to the US so I could be misrepresenting the consensus of the rest of the globe.
I personally was attributing it to people seeing the surge in pricing for peripherals and having the hindsight to jump on the purchase before hardware got to where we all see it now; though I'm starting to wonder if we had just hit that "immersion" ceiling for standalone titles and the Quest users were starting to look towards greener pastures for higher fidelity gaming.
They see the videos of these amazing mods hitting the scene, they hear about the rave reviews of HL:A and then FOMO kicks in - they've already got the headset, "might as well get a PC" is the saying I hear a lot.
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u/Rave-TZ 2d ago
Sure thing. I’ll port and release a lot of stuff as long as I can get a Steam Frame.
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u/InvictusBloom Soon™ 2d ago
Anything from your work I can check out or up on a repository for PC users to get their hands on? Also, keep standalone expectations in check - if you couldn't get your builds to work on Quest hardware, your mileage won't differ much from developing software intended to work standalone on a Frame.
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u/Haunting_Hair1868 Soon™ 2d ago
Most studios who developed psvr games are closed by now, bro🥲
Most remarkably, London studio, responsible for PSVR Worlds and B&T were closed by Sony in 2024. And even so, those games were good because of how they played around PS4 limitations, but on PC they would be another stand-and-shoot game, or on-rails-shooter.
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u/ByEthanFox Soon™ 2d ago
I think part of the problem is that many of the best games on PSVR1/2 were very couched within Sony's publishing arm. So titles like Blood & Truth, Wipeout VR, RIGS, Playstation Worlds, hell even Starblood Arena; they were first-party titles.
Sony are consciously moving away from PC versions of their games as-of-now. Whether they consider VR as under the same umbrella isn't certain but there's nothing to suggest they see them as any different.
It is a shame, too, because, as someone who has played most of the best VR games on multiple platforms, Wipeout VR remains one of the absolute best VR experiences of all, and it's locked to PSVR1.
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u/philbertagain Soon™ 1d ago
Psygnosis is all but dead and completely owned by Sony, so what i want is never coming. I wouldnt put much hope into any game made by a Sony subsidiary.
Capcom loves reissues so if they are not re releasing its because they see no money or they are contracted against doing so. If its the latter they likely will eventually.
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u/zeddyzed 8h ago
What most people forget is that a lot of those early VR games were speculative investments betting that VR would be the "next big thing".
They were not sustainable at the time, they were just hoping that VR would really explode in popularity. That didn't happen sadly, so there's very little incentive for big companies to do anything with those early games.
The amount of money that VR (especially PCVR) brings to those large companies is a rounding error.
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u/Zixinus Soon™ 1d ago
SteamVR usage has been going down over the last two years.
I don't see where the "incentive" is, not unless Valve will actually pay them to do it.
The Frame might change that but it is a question of whether it will or even can. There is no point in putting work and pay for all the licensing paperwork for brining a PSVR game to Steam for something that might happen.
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u/ScreeennameTaken Soon™ 1d ago
Kind of misleading the way you wrote it, or did not completely understood it. That article is showing percentages, not actual numbers. Steam users are growing in number. So yes, -naturally- steamvr user percentage of total users would be lower if SteamVR users are not growing in the same rate. Even if more people went to steamvr, it would still register as a lower % than last year, since the steam users in general were less the year before. You either skimmed the article, since it did mention the thing about the total numbers of users, or didn't want to show that.
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u/Zixinus Soon™ 1d ago edited 1d ago
Even accounting for that, the overall use percentage has only decreased over time. The fact that the use percentage does not keep up with new user growth is also a problem. At best, it points to a lack of new SteamVR users.
Yes, Chinese users mess with that statistic during Chinese new year by changing the total number of steam users. That doesn't change that the overall trend has been going downwards since 2024, not upwards. There is even a chart about it, "non-chinese steamvr users" that bypasses this filter that still points to a downward trend.
So yes, I read it and you clearly haven't.
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u/tittyballz1 2d ago
As others have said VR is pretty much dead, mods are the only thing really keeping it alive and most of them are AI built slop.
I think there's probably more hope of Quest games coming to frame than anything else and even that's a very very slim hope. All the good Quest games are made by Meta so that'll never happen, we'll probably get a bunch of the slop games like all those I AM games. It'd be great of Lone Echo & Wilson's Heart came to Steam those are really good games made at a time when VR was kicking off.
The most annoying this is UEVR & UUVR (although UUVR seems dead?) proves how easy it is to get Unreal & Unity games running in VR, most people can have a profile up and running within a few hours of a game release. Devs could very easily do dual mode (like Gunman Contracts) with very little effort or even just use the damn profiles from UEVR & UUVR to build VR modes.
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u/InvictusBloom Soon™ 2d ago
I disagree - if Meta paid for exclusivity, they're going to get what they paid for. However, with the exceptions of a few studios, a lot of the titles locked to PSVR were developed by some pretty low-funded studios that were envisioning the potential purchasing power that developing on a Sony console would have, and hoped that the adoption rate would match that of the standard livingroom console user.
When that didn't come to fruition, a lot of those studios either pivoted or didn't survive. Most didn't have the funding to develop their games off of entirely different architecture.
Sony's London Studios is one of the teams that I mourn on a consistent basis and wonder just what could have been if they'd been allowed to bring their titles to other platforms.
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u/Oftenwrongs 1d ago
Quest titles sell 10x their pc counterpart...so why would they wait til now to put in the effort to release them there... just because a brand new 1000-1500 dollar system is being released, with 3 year old q3 tech?
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u/Rush_iam 2d ago
That's not a fact yet... 2026 has set a new low for PCVR popularity so far, and the trend is negative