Watch Gabe Newell's "Oprah moment" as he gives out free VR headsets

In Los Angeles earlier today Gabe Newell gave a crowd of VR developers what might be the best present this side of a Half-Life 3 announcement. During the Vision VR summit keynote he told those in attendance that they will all be getting a free HTC Vive Pre headset. A grinning Newell described it as "his Oprah moment", and—as you can see from the video—the room went predictably nuts.

Unity’s press release, sent out after the keynote, doesn’t offer much more in the way of detail.

“Valve and Unity Technologies today announced a new collaboration to offer native support for SteamVR in the Unity Platform, giving developers new reach at no extra cost,” it reads. “Additionally, a new VR rendering plugin has been added to further enhance functionality.

“Integration of the SteamVR code delivers native support for Valve's upcoming SteamVR platform to all of Unity’s developers. Beyond SteamVR support, Valve has developed an advanced SteamVR rendering plugin for Unity that allows for enhanced fidelity and performance, bringing consumers more realistic experiences.”

The press release also includes a brief quote from Newell which states that most of Valve’s demos for the Vive were made with Unity. From my experience demoing games on both Vive and Oculus, I’d say that’s true across the board—the majority of the games I’ve played were built on Unity, so better VR support natively integrated into the engine can only mean good things.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).