Valve, the creators of the Half-Life series and semi-owners of the entire PC gaming scene, has been on a roll this week. They’ve announced that they’ll be releasing their own operating system, SteamOS, for free. Then they announced that the much awaited Steam Box (dubbed “Steam Machines“), will be released in multiple forms by separate manufacturers.
But the title of this piece is about a Steam controller. And it’s a doozie. Outside of a shape that resembles something that you might come to expect of a modern controller, the entire controller is almost completely different than anything you’ve ever played with.
Let’s do a rundown of the major bulletpoints here:
- Analog sticks? Nope. The Steam controller uses dual trackpads with haptic feedback.
- ABXY buttons? Yes but… they are split up around the middle of the controller.
- Mini touch screen? Check. Taking a page from Nintendo, Valve has put a touch screen in their controller, albeit a much smaller one.
- Legacy support? Yes, the controller can automatically pretend to be a mouse and keyboard without fiddling around with the controls too much.
- Hackable? Yes, it’s made by Valve, after all.
Alright enough of the jibber jabber, look at the device for yourself and let your judgement reign supreme in the comment section below.
