I mean, technically, the Steam Controller is neat and all. And it’s pretty customizable, so I get people who want to use it for some specific application.
I mean, as I understand it, the Steam Controller was aimed at supporting the Steam Machine. The basic problem was that Valve sold a large library of PC-oriented titles. A lot of these used a mouse. Gamepads were a poor substitute for the mouse. Valve wanted to get Steam into the living room, so put out their own video game console entrant.
But the Steam Machine didn’t sell well, so Valve’s reason for making the Steam Controller kind of went away. Most people gaming on a PC can just, well, use a mouse. I’m not saying that there’s no market for the thing – I’m sure that there are people who use a non-Steam-Machine PC to play games in the living room. But the intended use case for the thing kind of got clobbered.
It looks like there are still people selling Steam Controllers on eBay, though I assume that they aren’t going to be getting a whole lot of maintenance from Valve, given that they sold in relatively small numbers, and they haven’t been sold for about five years now. You could probably get one there.
I played Doom 2016 on the couch with. Touchpads for large camera movements and the gyro for precise aiming. Worked very good after getting used to it, felt better / more dynamic than a classic gamepad.
That might take some remapping to glue the inputs to a given game, as I bet that it’s presenting itself to the system as a USB hub with an attached keyboard, gamepad, and touchpad.
I mean I still have my Steam Controller but I wish they’d just rerelease the thing. For the 60 bucks back then it was an absolute bargain considering ehat you can do with it. And I have to say, it felt also really nice to hold with the kinda grip you’d have on it, which is really different.
Straight up the only controller that doesn’t give me hand/wrist fatigue. I was a little disappointed they didn’t try something similarly whacky with the ergonomics of the deck.
Yeah hopefully we get a steam controller 2 that’s basically the same as the steam deck but I’m not holding my breath. It’s the perfect control scheme for PC in my view at least.
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