The Steam Controller Is Valve's Third Announcement

Consider me interested. As with all of their announcements this week, I'm going to wait until there's more details and until I can actually get one of these in my hands before I make any judgements, but yeah, pretty cool stuff. Weird looking design, but if anyone could pull this whole thing off Valve would be the people to do it I think.

I've cared very little up to this point about a Steam box, and this isn't helping.

This is all starting to seem like valve is making a cry for help

There sure are a lot of "Experts" in these comments that obviously and factually know better than Valve how to make a controller.

Why are you people here and not making millions improving this industry!?

Anyway, i think at this point, after fifteen years of using the same goddamn controller with small incremental upgrades we've got that particular design nailed down. No need for another classic two stick controller. There's enough of those around.

http://tommyrefenes.tumblr.com/post/62476523677/my-time-with-the-steam-controller

Impression from Tommy Refenes programmer on Super Meat Boy. Impression generally positive but the controller could use some minor improvements, pretty much the only reason he would prefer a 360 controller is because he is more used to it.

Yeah, this is Valve, so I'll wait and see how it is. It's really different, so maybe it'll be complete shit, or maybe it'll be revolutionary.

Also, obligatory;

The controller looks so Bizarre, it's singin' "Mr. Happy" up in this bitch.

It isn't?

The Valve Controller is even properly equipped for Divekick, what can't this thing do?!

@k9: sorry but no. SC2 requires so many hot keys that playing on this controller would be impossible and not fun. At least not if you're playing multiplayer

Can I play Dota on this? if not NO SALE

Apparently a lot of devs visited the Valve offices to try it and they liked it

http://kotaku.com/valves-controller-has-been-tested-here-are-some-impre-1415579308

@pillclinton: Heheh. I guess we Brits are a little trigger-happy with the use of 'tosh'

So this is for use in tandem with an xbox controller, right? I can't see this thing doing well in skyrim, super meat boy or L4D

Steam has an offline mode and will continue to have one. Also, Steam is much more open and encourages pricing competition, XBL isn't and does not. Comparing MS original plan with steam is just bollocks.

Don't talk shit about Euro Truck Simulator 2.

@evercaptor said:

Gamasutra: "My time with the Steam Controller" by Tommy Refenes

If this was made by any other company, it would be ridiculed in an instant.

100% agreed. I don't like the current sticks even a little bit, they're not very good at all. But until I have one of these in my hands I just don't see how squeezing my hands, clicking the sticks and one more button I have no idea where to find will replace face buttons.

So who this uh..... obelisk.... designed to be held by exactly? Screw the fact that supposedly I am going to be using two trackpads for not only my analog sticks but also buttons apparently (????) it looks about uncomfortable as hell to actually hold in your hands.

I cant believe so many users are blinded by "it's valve" to the point where they think the steambox is anything other than a mini pc (we call them HTPC's by the way, they already exist) and this "controller" is anything but a train wreck waiting to happen.

Seriously Gabe, stop believing the internet. You are not actually Jesus.

Have you never used a game controller before? Are you seriously not seeing the resemblance in form to a 360 controller? Have you never used a 360 controller to play a PC game?

The reactions like this are what I imagine people were doing when wireless controllers were first introduced: "It'll never work! There will be tons of lag between pressing a button and seeing the action on screen! Do these professional electric and mechanical engineers with years of training and experience think we're idiots or something?"

Those people were absolutely right though. The input lag DOES matter. That's why games today are generally much less precise than they were when they were played on CRTs and wired controllers. They can't demand that tight timing anymore because the of the latency introduced by modern hardware.

I'm not sure if this thing is intended to be used for games, or just for UI in situations where a mouse and keyboard aren't available/practical.

yup, definitely not HL3...

but being the valve fanboy i am, i will own one of these goofy things.

a real trucker doesint need a controller he uses his bare hands no gloves because redneck pride

Not sure for whom this controller is meant. I highly doubt that I will give up the precision and speed of mouse and keyboard for a controller that works with touch.

I also dont think that I want to play console based fps games with a touch based controller. There could be a chance that I am proven wrong and the new controller will be amazing but innovation isnt always a good thing.

Maybe I am not just the user that this controller is intended for.

I'm amused by all the 'hypocrite' accusations being thrown around by people.

"People laughed at Nintendo when they made a tablet controller!" - Yes. A tablet controller. They put a non-multitouch, mammoth tablet screen in their 'controller'. This is a controller-sized controller, with a small touch screen, smaller than a Vita in total width.

And Valve is very pro-consumer, Microsoft not so much (or if they are now, they're struggling to portray that their not after their E3 disaster.

Yes to professional gamers. To the rest of us whose living isn't being made by the difference of milliseconds in response time, the convenience way outweighs any potential 'missed shot' (which is more often our own biological reaction time delays then the technology we use).

But my point is people running around screaming with their hands in the air, similar to the poster I quoted, is almost laughable. History repeating itself whenever some new groundbreaking/game changing technology is introduced. Indoor plumbing - oh noes!

You mean like what happened with Microsoft? I was against the Xbone as well, and I don't see the difference here, other than you can wipe Steam OS and put either Windows or regular Linux on the thing, at which point... I already have a pretty OK PC...

My point was, if people had not changed the way they made games to compensate for the new televisions and controllers, that shit would not have worked. You can't reliably pull off, say, 3 frame jumps on a modern setup, and there were quite a few games in the early 90s and later that required that kind of precision.

This thing will not create a sea change in the industry, developers will not design the way gamers interact with their products with this thing in mind, and therefore the button placement is going to not work all that well with the vast majority of games for sale on the steam platform. That's not just awful design, it's stupid as hell.

Ha. I thought Valve was serious about a console like set top box. Whew. I didn't think I could afford another console.

Its funny that you say that when devs have already been building 360 controller support in to new PC games - Skyrim and Borderlands 2 for instance. That controller support took some programmers time to build in to the PC versions. So how can you pronounce "developers will not design the way gamers interact with their products with this thing in mind" when its already being done with current gen controllers/games? Especially when this controller is trying to undo the fatal flaw of the thumbstick - aweful performance in FPS style games.

Anyways if you don't like the input device, just stick with mouse/kb. The real excitement is moving away from Microsoft being the gatekeeper to PC gaming and letting devs small and large use the open environment of Unix. The controller is what I'm most excited about as it will increase my physical comfort while gaming/reduce chances of chronic RSI injury IF it can mimic the precision of a mouse.

Clearly you haven't been playing the right games. I first learned about haptic feedback from listening to and reading the Codex entries in Mass Effect 1.

Personally, I think the controller looks interesting. I'm not going to buy one, but good on them for doing something different. It's nothing if not unique.

What? Borderlands 2 and Skyrim were designed to work on the consoles as well as PC. The work they did on the PS3 and 360 versions were directly transferrable to the PC with no extra thought or work required on the design end. They had a HUGE install base to incentivize implementing that support and it took very little to implement it in windows. That's hardly the same as designing the game to work with two radically different input methods, where one has x amount of easily reachable buttons and the other has y.

And considering there are millions of people out there with 360 and PS3 controllers playing on consoles, that the majority of games are multiplatform (of the games people actually care about). So you can design for the PC, the xbox and the playstation and only have to figure out how the controller inputs will work ONCE. The you look at the install base of the steam controller and decide if it makes sense to dedicate the resources to actually design the game to work with that as well. I'm willing to bet money that most large publishers will not be willing to do that for a long long time, if ever.

Quickly we must rise against the machines before they completely indoctrinate us! Too late...

@alexandersheen: you mean outright dismissed because people are afraid of new things and crave stagnation? the way things are going, especially with the "new" consoles, we're about to hit a brick wall in terms of innovation. i'm not blind and i can see the potential problems with this, but neither am i going to be an asshole and call it garbage without giving it a chance. i would personally love to try this thing, and if it ends up being a failure then, so be it.

Everyone complaning about this controller without having touched it needs to read this http://tommyrefenes.tumblr.com/post/62476523677/my-time-with-the-steam-controller from the maker of Super Meat Boy. Someone who knows a thing or two about the need for responsive controllers.

@leebmx: He answered a question after he posted that about not having played any 3d action game where he needs movement, camera movement and face buttons, and possibly looking into going back and trying something like that. I want to see someone playing Fifa 14 on the thing also, for that matter.

This actually sounds awesome, and seems to be a great way to emulate precise mouse movements... maybe even better than a mouse. I still think it's a huge problem that there aren't additional face buttons on the right, though. Most games nowadays need peripherals with *more* buttons, not less. I was disappointed when the xBone and PS4 didn't have a couple extra buttons (though not surprised), and this would be even worse in that regard. ...But yeah it's certainly interesting.

Yes. The controller gets a fair amount of shit as it is and it's made by Valve, one of the most loved gaming companies. If it was, lets say, from a small company, it would be outright dismissed by generally everyone. Maybe I just don't have faith in the internet.

I'm skeptical about the face buttons. They seem illogically placed. They seem too far from the thumbs, but that may be optical illusion. But they sure as hell seem spread too far from each other. Most melee combat games (I play a bunch of those) require you to push two buttons at once mid-combo. I don't see myself pulling those off easily with this placement. Also, it seems weird to me how it has two on each side. So, if I use the left track pad for movement, I will only have two more buttons as an option, because asking me to stop moving for another action seems inefficient and I highly doubt that'll work nicely.

I guess the actions could be mapped to the triggers instead. Perhaps that could work, although I'm skeptical if that's the best place for the stuff I have in mind.

But I won't know until I play it. Lack of D-Pad isn't good though. Touchscreen will not make up for that properly. I suspect this controller will see an update rather quickly with a proper layout. It doesn't seem designed to optimally play the games of today. Perhaps they were so focused on making it work for strategy games that they forgot to look into other genre's.

So if consoles have brought "a HUGE install base to incentivize implementing that support", why is there no native PS3 controller support in Borderlands 2 and Skyrim? And given Steam is THE default platform for PC gaming communities, how is it that a controller developed for Steam won't garner industry wide support?

"The Steam Controller is designed to work with all the games on Steam: past, present, and future. Even the older titles in the catalog and the ones which were not built with controller support. (We’ve fooled those older games into thinking they’re being played with a keyboard and mouse, but we’ve designed a gamepad that’s nothing like either one of those devices.)"

"Traditional gamepads force us to accept compromises. We’ve made it a goal to improve upon the resolution and fidelity of input that’s possible with those devices. The Steam controller offers a new and, we believe, vastly superior control scheme, all while enabling you to play from the comfort of your sofa. Built with high-precision input technologies and focused on low-latency performance, the Steam controller is just what the living-room ordered."

...don't you think gamers will gravitate to an input device that offers all the convenience of a mouse without the wrist/shoulder agrivation and all the convenience of sitting comfortably on a couch or chair without having to pony up to a desk?

Its your point of view that perplexes me. This is future tech - give it a chance before writing it off.

@oldschool2112: Because the manufacturers need to take care of the controller support. Not game devs. Game devs can add controller support, but the PS3 controller is not created for PC gaming and that's why it doesn't work (well). Microsoft created a dongle to use the 360 controller. That's why that controller is supported. Not because game devs only added 360 controller support. If Sony did this than PS3 controller support would also be readily available.

But yeah, I agree we should give this thing a chance. But I'm very skeptical so far. Track pads sound great, but besides that it all seems... not optimized for gaming.

Because they have the exact same button layout. Minus the casing, the stick placement and button names they're the same device, essentially. And the reason everyone goes for 360 pad support in windows games is two-fold. One is, it's fucking free with dxinput. Couple lines of code and it just works. Number two is that the 360 pad is the defacto standard for windows. Works out of the box without a driver, wired or wireless, that sort of thing. Installing the PS3 pad under windows is still a bit of an ordeal, and it does other unfortunate stuff to your system as well (takes over BT controller or USB port, making it useless for any other device you want to stick in there)

Also, we are talking about completely different things here. I'm talking about how people sit down with the controller in hand and design the interactions the game will have with that controller in mind. Shit like, they don't want you to have to do dumb stuff like pushing the left stick all the way to the left while hitting the d-pad. Or limiting the times you have to hit L1 and L2 at the same time while moving the left stick. How no game has you hold the A and Y buttons at the same time. That shit is like it is because someone sat down and thought about it early in the process of designing the very fundemental gameplay.

This thing, with the divergent button placement will not get the fruits of that labour. And yeah, Steam sells a lot of games, but not more than consoles, and I'm willing to bet that for a long time yet there will be more 360 pads hooked up to computers playing steam games than there will be steam controllers. Hence, the designers do that work once, because it works for a majority of people, and they only have to do the work once. Then maybe they think about mouse and keyboard support, but most of the time they just slap something together in a hurry (try playing any fifa game from the last decade with mouse and keyboard. That game was obviously not designed with that type of input in mind).

What you are talking about is just basic support. That will obviously be there. Along with remapping and everything else. Doesn't really negate the bigger issue of fundamental design choices made based on the layout of the other pads though. And of course, like I said earlier, maybe computers being relabeled steam machines is all it will take and consoles will disappear from the face of the earth by xmas 2015, and then developers will have the steam controller in mind when laying out the basic interactions the games will feature. I wouldn't hold my breath though.

Oh, and there's another huge dumb issue with the thing, from what I've seen some people point out. You can do stuff like map the inner circle of the right pad to mouse look and buttons around the outside. There are a million different ways of laying that stuff out. With ZERO labeling. And no physical buttons, so you're feeling your way for the jump button and accidentally move the camera. Or you move your thumb a little too far up and hit whatever, the software button you mapped to melee attack or something. Usability HELL.

This thing looks badass. It seems like it has no buttons but really it has all the buttons.. All of them. They got touchys on the back too.

This is almost getting too long to quote. I think the main difference here is that you don't believe controllers will be a huge factor in game design. I believe they will if a better input device then the mouse comes along (and its far from due).

@oldschool2112: I know that controllers is a huge part of game design. Specifically the 360 and PS3 controllers. What I think is that it's going to take a LONG time for this device to be relevant enough for game designers to do all that work twice. And I'm talking about big games here. The kind you pay $50-60 for. I don't doubt it'll see a swell of support from indie devs at all. But if you're building your business on that basis you're about to be Ouya 2.0.

And obviously, the ~3000 games already on steam aren't going to support the thing properly either. It'll work for a lot of them, but there are a lot where the number and placement of buttons just won't work very well.

@amafi: well you have stated my point - the world is waiting for a controller that rivals the mouse. Valve has stated that their catalog will run with this thing. Given thumb-sticks are ridiculously inaccurate I want to believe Valve that this solves the FPS issue when compared to using mouse/kb . If so this controler will be revolutionary do you not agree?