Valve’s long-awaited standalone VR headset, Deckard, could be here before year’s end according to word on the street from China

According to a Chinese analyst group called the XR Research Institute, Upload VR reports, Valve Deckard is set to ship at the end of this year during the holiday season. Mass production has apparently begun, and 400,000–600,000 units are expected per year.

Deckard, for those unaware, is Valve’s long-, long-, long-anticipated VR headset that’s expected to be a standalone device not requiring PC power, unlike the Valve Index. We first caught wind of it back in June 2022, thanks to a December 2021 patent application.

Since then, we’ve had rumour after rumour, including that ‘Roy’ controllers for Deckard were being tooled last year, that Valve was importing VR manufacturing equipment into the US earlier this year, and that some influencers recently travelled to Seattle and were a little cryptic about it.

It’s one of those things that has been on the cards for such a long time that it has somehow seemed to be imminently approaching, and yet also a little like a fable we’ll never see the real sight of.

Thankfully, if this latest report out of China is to be believed, we might be seeing sight of, and potentially even getting hands on, Valve Deckard headsets before the year is out. Some believe it might be called the Steam Frame rather than Deckard, when all is said and done, thanks to Valve applying for a ‘Steam Frame’ trademark and SteamVR code recently renaming certain things to “Frames.”

The naming doesn’t matter, really. What matters is that we might be getting a new VR headset from Valve. And just in case I need to spell out why that’s so important, here are two points worth noting.

First, the Index was absolutely fantastic when it launched, but it’s a little old now. Second, Valve has had plenty of practice perfecting budget hardware with the Steam Deck. Deckard could end up being a budget VR headset to compete with the Meta Quest 3S, for instance.

However, Upload VR points out that the 400,000–600,000 unit per-year figure aligns more closely to an Apple Vision Pro device than a cheaper one. That might put Deckard in line with how the Index was priced at launch, i.e. bloody expensive. But it was also bloody well-built and a step above the competition at the time, so it’s swings and roundabouts, really. Whatever the case, we might not have long to wait to find out.