As confirmed by Road to VR, Valve will be doing a full reveal of their Index virtual reality (VR) headset on May 1st with pre-orders of the headset and Knuckles controllers to follow. The company will release the headset and controllers in June, with the headset’s launch happening sometime in June.
This reveal initially came after Twitter user Wario64 uncovered an official Steam product page for the Index, which has since been taken down from the site, but can still be viewed in screenshots and cached Google searches.
While this page went live on April Fool’s Day, Road To VR reached out to a Valve spokesperson about the validity of the claims, to which they said that the information “while not comprehensive, is accurate.” That statement seems to be backed up by the “Lorem ipsum” placeholder text, and the following marketing copy and technical specifications should be taken with a grain a salt as they have not been officially confirmed. However, if the page’s information is accurate as the Valve spokesperson says, the Index will be shipping out on June 15th, 2019.
As we stated in our original article on the Index’s initial reveal, though no compatible games or apps have been revealed as of this writing, Valve’s formal entry into the VR headset market could also provide VR’s killer app. In 2004, in order to play the hotly-anticipated Half-Life 2, Valve required gamers to install Steam in order to play it. At the time, most PC games were purchased in brick and mortar stores. 15 years later, the PC games market has shifted almost entirely to digital distribution. Awakening the long dormant Half-Life franchise may be what VR needs to spread mass adoption of not just the Index, but of VR as a whole.
