Sorry folks, Valve’s not announcing a new VR headset today—or at least not the Valve Prism, despite the surprise appearance of a website, valveprism.com, that very nearly looks like the real deal.
The new site started making the rounds on Wednesday and on first blush very much looks like a Valve production. The page design, fonts, and many of the technical details seem closely in line with the store pages for the Steam Deck and Valve Index. And it’s exciting to imagine Valve having a competitor for the Apple Vision Pro, with an equally impressive display in a wireless headset that no longer requires a PC to power it. The whole thing’s quite believable until you look very closely at the details.
Perhaps most damning, as online sleuths started pointing out, is the copyright disclaimer at the bottom of the page. “Valve” is actually spelled “VaIve” with a capital letter ‘i’, rather than a lowercase ‘L’. You can confirm that for yourself by opening the site and doing a Ctrl+F for either letter.
Here’s where this thing gets especially strange: the site seems to be building on a two-month-old gag from the Midwest Furfest, a furry convention held last December. At the time, YouTuber Brad Lynch tweeted a photograph of silly stickers stickers hyping up the “Valve Deckard” launching on February 14, 2024.
which of you furry cope addicts are spreading these stickers at Midwest Furfest?this level of copium is DANGEROUS and irresponsible! pic.twitter.com/OjbX2TLeP2December 1, 2023
The Prism site’s security certificate isn’t registered to Valve Corp [US], which is the case with steampowered.com and valvesoftware.com (though oddly not the case with steamdeck.com, either). More importantly, though, the domain was created today, February 14, and registered through Cloudflare unlike Valve’s other domains. That means someone had this prank site built and ready to roll out, which doesn’t exactly strike me as Valve’s style. There’s also no mention of the device on Steam itself or any of Valve’s social channels, though that hasn’t stopped at least one member of the furry community from running with the prank and claiming otherwise.
Lynch, whose YouTube channel is dedicated to VR, seems to be taking the fake pretty hard.
There are other clues that the Prism isn’t real scattered around the page if you need more convincing, including the phrasing of this bit of advertising copy:
“We worked with AMD to create the Valve Prism’s custom APU, optimized to maximize performance where it matters most in VR titles. Powered by AMD’s Zen 4 + RDNA 3 architecture, we’re able to deliver a high-quality PC VR experience in a fraction of the power of a full PC. Everything we learned from building Steam Deck is on full display in Prism.”
It’s a clunky rewrite of this pair of sentences on the Steam Deck OLED page, actually written by Valve:
“We partnered with AMD to create Steam Deck’s custom APU, optimized for handheld gaming. It is a Zen 2 + RDNA 2 powerhouse, delivering more than enough performance to run the latest AAA games in a very efficient power envelope.”
In the Prism’s description, “We worked with” and that last line about the Steam Deck both read as off to me. So do some of the tech specs, including an improbable 32GB of RAM and “50-point lips, jaw, teeth, and tongue tracking.” The micro OLED panel also claims to be marginally higher resolution than the one in the $3499 Apple Vision Pro, despite the Prism supposedly selling for $1299.
We’ve reached out to Valve for comment and will update this story when we receive a reply.
