Valve’s virtual reality plans hit actual reality

Valve 的虚拟现实计划遭遇现实挑战

The Steam Frame headset is here, and it may not surprise you: it was supposed to cost less than $1,059. “We set out to come out with a device that would have been far more affordable, but the global RAM market, the global storage market have impacted us the same way they’ve impacted everybody,” Valve developer Jeremy Selan told the BBC. “We fought hard to get it even to this price.”

Steam Frame 头显现已发布，这或许并不令人惊讶：它原本的定价应该低于 1,059 美元。Valve 开发人员 Jeremy Selan 在接受 BBC 采访时表示：“我们最初的目标是推出一款价格更亲民的设备，但全球内存和存储市场对我们造成的影响，与对其他所有人造成的影响是一样的。我们竭尽全力才将价格控制在目前的水平。”

I haven’t yet seen Valve say whether it’s selling the Steam Frame at cost, like the company confirmed it was doing with the $1,049 Steam Machine living room PC. But Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais hinted maybe so in an interview with Tom’s Hardware: “there’s not really any sort of the kind of distortion compared to just the price of the parts in there.”

我尚未看到 Valve 确认是否以成本价销售 Steam Frame，就像该公司此前确认其 1,049 美元的 Steam Machine 客厅电脑那样。但 Valve 开发人员 Pierre-Loup Griffais 在接受 Tom’s Hardware 采访时暗示了这种可能性：“与内部零件的成本相比，价格并没有太大的溢价。”

When IGN asked Griffais why Valve didn’t simply ship the Steam Frame with less RAM, he answered: “I think at this point, things were a little bit too far in development to fully rethink the product.”

当 IGN 询问 Griffais 为什么 Valve 不直接减少 Steam Frame 的内存配置时，他回答道：“我认为在那个阶段，产品的开发进度已经太靠后了，无法对产品进行彻底的重新构思。”

When it first announced the Steam Frame, Valve said it was targeting a lower price than its previous Valve Index headset, which cost $999 at launch and required a direct plug into a PC. The Steam Frame is wireless, can stream from a PC over Wi-Fi or its included 6GHz USB wireless dongle, and it can also play not-so-demanding games on its own Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and 16GB of RAM. Valve said that amount of RAM helped it get Half-Life: Alyx running natively on the headset.

Valve 在首次宣布 Steam Frame 时曾表示，其目标价格低于之前的 Valve Index 头显（后者发布时售价 999 美元，且需要直接连接 PC）。Steam Frame 是无线的，可以通过 Wi-Fi 或随附的 6GHz USB 无线适配器从 PC 进行串流，也可以利用其内置的 Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 芯片和 16GB 内存独立运行一些负载较低的游戏。Valve 表示，正是这种内存配置使其能够让《半衰期：爱莉克斯》(Half-Life: Alyx) 在头显上原生运行。

While the price might be high, Valve says it’s “pretty comfortable” with it because other computing gear is getting more expensive at the same time.

尽管价格可能偏高，但 Valve 表示对此“相当坦然”，因为其他计算设备的价格也在同步上涨。

“[I]f you look at the memory and anything that has a similar amount of memory, it’s kind of trending the same direction and Steam Machine is not really getting more expensive than a comparable PC,” Griffais told IGN. “They’re kind of evolving at the same spot in the same market, and I think the same will apply to the Frame as well.”

“如果你看看内存以及任何具有类似内存容量的设备，它们的趋势都是一样的。Steam Machine 的价格其实并没有比同类 PC 更贵，”Griffais 对 IGN 说道。“它们在同一个市场中处于相似的演进阶段，我认为 Steam Frame 也将遵循同样的规律。”