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Half Life: Alyx is Five Years Old Today
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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The idea of sinking $500 into a headset and then another $80 for one game is pretty crazy. Not like Valve doesn't have the ownership numbers from the hardware survey. It was never going to sell like HL2.
Do you know about gaming consoles? 3D accelerator cards? Graphics cards? Or... CD ROM drives?
People have been buying hardware to play a certain game for literal decades. The games are called "system sellers". Games so good they sell hardware. It's usually even the opposite: if your hardware doesn't have such a game, it doesn't sell (atari Jaguar anyone?).
VR has the extra element of needing a suitable living space to play in, though. Other games I can do at my desk or in my tiny, cramped living room, but I have nowhere I can easily set up for VR that would allow for significant range of motion.
I own a VR headset, but I only really use it for games that allow you to be stationary and just use the headset as an immersive monitor with a standard controller. As one would expect, it doesn't get much use, because not many VR games are made to play that way!
$1000 and your gaming PC for Alyx is way beyond buying a PS4 for Bloodborne, and even doing that is a bridge too far for me.
I thought you still needed to plug the VR headset into a computer ? is the computer built into the headset ?
Most of the common ones now do wireless streaming from the PC for PCVR. But yes, for PCVR games you will still need a PC to run it. There are some VR headsets that are capable of running some games on it without a connected PC, like my Quest 2 can run Superhot or BeatSaber etc.
Pretty cool I didn't know that at all
Yes for the standalone devices, but you can connect them via cable or wirelessly to a pc too
So people should buy hardware to play a single game and then leave the hardware to accumulate dust after a few hours of gameplay? Quite the waste!
I agree, that would silly. Luckily, Half-Life Alyx is not the only VR game.
Sure, but if people love Half-Life and don't care about other VR games it sucks that it's locked behind hardware requirements that even Valve doesn't give a crap about considering it's the only VR game they made.
Edit: I'm sure all of you would be pissed if Sony released a new PlayStation with one game from a beloved series and then just said "now it's in other people's hands, let them take care of creating more games for our hardware!"
It isn't up to Valve alone to push forward the industry and release top-tier VR games every other year. They took a risk and created one of the best games I've played, and I'm not alone in that opinion. Valve are trying expand the gaming experience, they are trying to be innovative, and people blame them for "not giving a crap". Say what you want, but I thank Valve for what they are doing.
God damn people want to just argue about everything
Block me if you're not happy
This entire argument can be made identically for Half-Life 1 and 2 requiring people to upgrade their PCs to be able to play them.
Didn't know Valve was selling PCs back in the day!
It's ok, get it out.
I mean it‘s 5 years old now and what has Valve released for VR since? A single game isn‘t gonna make a hardware and they know that. It was a failure in the end of the day.
You know Valve has released a whopping 3 things total in that timespan (didn't include deadlock cuz I'm not sure that's officially released yet), right? A free steam deck teaser, the card game they've been working on for a while, and the CSGO 2 update
Valve works slow, my guy
Good thing there are a shit ton of other games, then
No it wasn't, you high? They sold out of Indexes around the games launch. Would have sold more if not for COVID, too
Hold on. Why are you replying with unrelated things that Valve did instead of focusing on VR to get people onto that platform? Kind of proves my point, doesn‘t it? Also Covid? Seriously? If anything Covid should‘ve accelerated development on VR games.
Your claim was that the game was a failure, my point with COVID was that you would have been extra wrong about that had there not been a pandemic limiting how many headsets they could actually sell, which was the point of the game. In the world that we got they sold out and had Back-orders for a year, had there not been a global pandemic those Back-orders would have been sales, and likely many who couldn't buy one would have been able to as well
The rest of your comment shows you have 0 idea how Valve works internally. The whole studio doesn't just work on one project, there are smaller teams that pick and choose what they do. This is why Valve tends to release shit a couple years apart that are wildly different (Alyx and Artefact), but 5-8 years between similar products (Portal 2 and Alyx). It being 5 years or more since their last major VR release is to be expected from them, not a sign of failing at anything
The game starts at 60 USD and goes down to 30 pretty often. If you have VR already, it's not very expensive.
I'm showing it as $18 right now.
You could buy a quest 2, connect it to your 5 year old PC and play it just fine. I ran it off a gtx 1070ti with that headset just fine.
It's also way different from the goal of HL2. Downloading a launcher called Steam for free is not the same thing as buying specific hardware to play one game.
It's free if you buy an Index
not any more.
Maybe not in your country. I literally just checked on the American store and it's still included with the Valve Index.
They even give you a free copy of Half-Life Alyx if you buy a pair of knuckles controllers for $279.
that's annoying, i certainly didn't get a copy.
Plenty of people do that to play a single game.
Given how different it is to other, normal 3d games, I don't think the comparison is fair. Additionally there are a lot of other, really great games in VR too.
Regardless, I don't think the problem is financial anymore. Rather that VR requires a sort of "commitment to inconvenience" where you feel cut off from the outside world (among other things) that I don't think a lot of people are comfortable with.
It's both financial (huge investment for a single game) and not. Playing with a thing strapped to your face does not sound fun. Especially with glasses. Or in the summertime. Plus I'm a Linux gamer, so I'd probably run into a lot of issues before I could run it.
I also run on Linux exclusively and I could play Half-Life Alex almost flawlessy on the Steam Index. And other VR games as well, including Beatsaber, Gorn, Walkabout Golf and many others. I'm really grateful to Valve and their Proton.
Thanks, that's nice to know in case I decide to get a VR headset in the future.
Its $500 today but at the time it was $1500 and required cable and beacons.
True in regards to the index kit but WMR has been around for a long time as well and that was a fraction of the price without base stations.
Also nobody has missed out on playing it yet! There's still time before half life 3! 😅
True
it's doomed now, but I love my Reverb G2, I got it for the same price as a Quest 2 (before the q3 released) and, having used both, its a lot better.
Are "plenty of people" enough to make a game commercially viable? And not in an indie way.
I zone out, completely cut off from others, while playing games all the time. What I don't want to do is fork over more cash for things that will collect dust (like a headset for a single game).
Given how different it is to other, normal 3D games, I think it's a bit much to stake your franchise on something most people will never have. It's obvious Valve knew that, they're not idiots and have put out good hardware that didn't see mass adoption in the past (Steam Controller, Steam Link, etc.); it's clear they wanted to try out something new even if it wasn't a huge blockbuster. They have lots of revenue from other sources to fall back on.
They probably hoped that some people would take a chance and get the hardware to play the game, and some people did. But to expect that most would do that? Lol. They're not that dumb.
"The idea" was to do something no one had done before with a beloved franchise. Not to sell headsets.
I don't think they particularly cared if you bought their headset, but they had the premium offering if you were interested. I think they wanted Alyx to be the Mario 64 of VR.