Windows Mixed Reality’s October launch imperilled by initial lack of SteamVR support

Microsoft announced last week that it’s teaming up with a bunch of companies and studios to bring a huge amount of new content to its Windows Mixed Reality platform. The software giant is launching a couple of Windows Mixed Reality headsets from companies like Dell, Lenovo, and Acer on October 17 alongside the release of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. But the big news was that Microsoft is teaming up with Vive to bring support for SteamVR to Windows Mixed Reality — allowing users to experience virtual reality content from Steam on their Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, Windows Mixed Reality won’t support content from SteamVR on its initial launch. According to German site ComputerBase, Windows Mixed Reality’s communication director Greg Sullivan stated that support for SteamVR won’t be available on the launch day. In fact, Sullivan mentioned that the companies have just started working on the integration — and it’ll probably take a while before Windows Mixed Reality users can actually run content from SteamVR on their new headsets.

When it comes to gaming  (or any other software) development, an old adage is that you should always buy a product for what it has now rather than based on promises of future features. Despite the number of software launch partners Microsoft announced, the lack of support for SteamVR’s large catalogue from the outset has just made the product a lot less interesting, and will probably mean I will hang on a few months to see if it will really materialize before spending hundreds of dollars.

Do our readers agree?