First, we got the good news that Half-Life: Alyx is on the way as a new virtual reality game from Valve. Now the deal is getting even better. Valve Index owners will get Half-Life: Alyx free with the purchase of Valve’s VR headset.
SteamDB and Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker noticed that there was some behind-the-scenes work going on with the data for the Valve Index. A mysterious new data package titled “app 546450” was added to a key called “steamvrtakehometest.exe”. Nobody knew for sure what this package was… until the reveal of Half-Life: Alyx.
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“AppID 546560 is Half-Life: Alyx, so Valve is giving the game for free to Index Owners,” Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker said in a tweet. This theory was corroborated by a blog post from SteamDB, where it echoes his speculation on the matter.
AppID 546560 is Half-Life: Alyx, so Valve is giving the game for free to Index Owners. https://t.co/qpGPafb6Ab
— Tyler McVicker (@Tyler_McV) November 21, 2019
This isn’t the first time that Valve released an app for free to support a VR device; the’ve also launched the Portal-themed game The Lab to give Steam users a bit of free HTC Vive content.
There is, however, two questions that still remain: firstly, will the new Half-Life game be given to all Valve Index owners, or only new purchases? And secondly, what about people who own the other kinds of VR headsets?
According to SteamDB, Half-Life: Alyx has been added as a complimentary package for the following hardware packages:
- Valve Index VR Kit
- Valve Index Headset
- Valve Index Headset + Controllers
- Valve Index Controllers
We can’t say with 100% certainty that Valve Index owners (past or present) are going to get Half-Life: Alyx for free, but we probably won’t have to wait too long to find out; Valve is expected to tell us more details about this latest romp in the Half-Life universe later today.
