Valve brings Steam VR support to Unity game engine

Gabe Newell may have just ensured that we'll have lots of games to play on all those Virtual reality (VR) headsets floating around. 

His company, Valve, has introduced Steam VR native support into their game development engine, Unity. This means that game developers, who have so far had far less to work with, can now easily make games for VR. Ideally, this means we're likely to see a lot more VR games, and possibly some of them smaller studios as well. Valve co-founder Newell stated yesterday, at the Vision VR / AR Summit, "We made many of our Vive demos using Unity, and continue to use it today in VR development. Through that process, and in working with VR developers, we found some opportunities to make Unity even more robust and powerful for us and really want to share those benefits with all VR content creators."

The downside is that none of those VR games, AAA or Indie, will be playable anytime soon; not until you have the hardware. The SteamVR needs the HTC Vive, which will be available in April, and includes two single-handed controllers, as well as two base stations for spatial room-mapping.

Valve has also added a new rendering plugin for Unity that provides "enhanced fidelity and performance".