Valve today announced that pre-orders for Index are set to arrive on May 1st with a shipping date of ‘sometime before the end of June’. And while we’ve been waiting patiently for any indication of the three full VR games Valve has been working on, the company today revealed that we’ll be getting at least one of them sometime this year.
In typical Valve fashion, the company is staying extremely tight-lipped about what they call their “flagship VR game.” As it stands now, we don’t know the game’s name, genre, price—basically anything outside of the fact that they’re intent on releasing it later this year.
One more interesting nugget: the company says it will be compatible with “other SteamVR headsets,” which will likely mean support for HTC Vive (Pro), Oculus Rift (S), and Windows VR headsets in addition to Index.
If what Valve has done in and around VR games serves as any indication, such as its long-standing VR favorite The Lab (2016) and the Valve-published Knuckles tech demo Moondust (2018), we’re not only expecting a studious understanding of what makes VR great, but also at an extremely high level of polish too boot.
Read our full hands-on with Valve Index
There’s plenty of speculative material out there as to what VR games Valve is working on. Tyler McVicker of the YouTube channel Valve News Network has done a fair bit of digging, and posits Valve may be preparing a Half-Life VR game, a game based in Portal’s Aperture Science lab, and a Left 4 Dead VR title.
As with all things Valve, there’s really no telling what they’ve been cooking up behind closed doors, and while this doesn’t lend credence to McVicker’s claims, a recognizable Valve IP would certainly build a draw not only to the company’s headset, but to VR in general.
In the meantime, we’ll be biting our nails, hoping for a day-one launch title from Valve to go along with Index when it lands on consumer doorsteps in June.