First time VR user.

Got my frame today, and tried to get the SO excited about it.

Problem is: what games are available?

I had talked to them prior to purchasing, explaining the state of the industry, there aren’t thousands of titles available, and the ones that are available aren’t all super long and engaging etc etc.

The frame is new, and trying to push the industry forward, so it’ll get better, but for now it’s rough. This was understood fully.

Here’s the problem: Actually FINDING the currently verified games.

I don’t care if there’s only a couple dozen, I want to see them in a curated list. But as far as I can tell, that doesn’t exist.

I know it’s still early, and proton db doesn’t have a list yet. But Valve could’ve done it easily. In fact, they got halfway there.

Trudging through the menus in the steam store, I did find a “great on deck” list. And googling the subject I found several people talking about the “great on frame” list that exists, but I could not find it.

Searching for “great on” showed a number of lists, including “great on deck” but no “great on frame”. Why on earth not?

Eventually I fumbled my way to the steam frame product page, and found a tiny single word little blue link. Clicking that brought me to the fabled “great on frame” list. And to its credit, all the games there were marked as verified great on frame onboard etc etc.

Great! Right? Wrong. That list includes ALL great on frame games, including all the non VR ones. Which is fine, we need a list for those too, but there should be two lists.

So I had to go through one by one and try to find games that were both verified on frame, AND VR enabled. The first one we downloaded that matched that criteria? Opened in non VR mode and there was no clear way to make it work. Very frustrating, lots of lost time.

Eventually we found a few that looked fun. Moss, red matter, and I expect you to die. But by that time we were so done that we just put it away for the night. Didn’t even try to play them yet. We did play a little beat saber.

I’m not trying to complain too much, I know I’m very lucky to both be in a position to buy this thing, and to have gotten one so early. But it was an expensive purchase that, while my SO agreed to and as excited for, was very frustrating and disappointing first experience.

Clunky and cludgy, no clear way to find what we’re looking for. The SO was navigating the store with the frame for a bit and kept losing the ability to navigate the store because they’d click on the wrong thing or press the wrong button, and end up highlighting some button in the corner of the screen. And no joy in finding anything to play when we actually got it to work.

Maybe there’s a better way? And we both missed it? But… If two people can’t figure it out… you might have a user interface problem.

The software side will get better with time. Little things will be fixed. And I explained that. All is well.

But Valve should’ve known better. I got a deck at launch, I know the pains we had then, and I figured they would’ve learned from that.

Hopefully by the time everyone else gets there’s, they will have resolved this issue.

I’m still really excited for this thing.

Thanks for coming to TED talk.