If you've followed VR for the past decade, you already know the punchline: a headset is only as good as what you can play on it. That lesson comes around again with the Valve Steam Frame, a $1,060 standalone headset that, according to Geeky-Gadgets' review, is being held back by a library of roughly 72 games.

Seventy-two. I remember when the Apple App Store launched with 500 apps and people wondered if that was enough. And that was a phone people already needed.

First, the good news, because there is plenty of it. The Steam Frame is wireless, which sounds like a small thing until you've spent an evening untangling yourself from a ceiling-mounted wire like a cat caught in yarn. It runs on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, which is genuinely fast silicon, and Valve's hardware pedigree shows. My colleague Marcus could tell you exactly why the thermal management matters here; I'll just say the thing runs smoothly and doesn't feel like a space heater strapped to your face.

The display is where the money goes, and it shows. Text is crisp, colors are rich, and the tracking is the kind you stop noticing after five minutes, which is the highest compliment you can pay tracking technology. When a game works well on this headset, it works beautifully.

And then you go looking for something else to play.

The standalone library sits at around 72 titles right now. Some are excellent, and a few are genuine showcases. But a $1,060 purchase deserves more than a long weekend's worth of content. I've watched this movie before. I owned a Sega Dreamcast. Beautiful machine, beloved machine, and it died partly because the ecosystem around it never grew fast enough. Hardware without an eager crowd of developers is a lovely paperweight waiting to happen.

To be fair to Valve, launch libraries always look thin. The original Steam Deck had a bumpy compatibility story in its first months, and look at it now, a genuine category-defining success. Valve has earned the benefit of the doubt more than most companies in this business. If any studio can will a software ecosystem into existence, it's the one that gave us Half-Life, Portal, and a storefront developers actually like.

But benefit of the doubt doesn't pay $1,060.

My advice, as always, is the boring kind: wait. Not forever, just a little. Check back in six months. If that library has tripled, if the big studios have committed, if the modding community has done what modding communities do, the Steam Frame becomes a very easy recommendation. The hardware will still be there. It might even be a little cheaper, though Valve isn't exactly known for fire sales.

If you're a devoted VR enthusiast, someone who already knows the 72 games by heart and wants the best wireless way to play them, this is arguably the nicest stand-alone kit you can buy today. For everyone else, myself included, it's a wait-and-see. Technology should work for you, and right now the Steam Frame asks you to work around it a bit.

I'll be keeping an eye on how that library grows through the holidays. And maybe, just maybe, I'll ask my granddaughter Jess if she wants to try VR over Thanksgiving, because if a 72-game library can survive a bored teenager's judgment, it can survive anything.