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back to article Valve aiming to take the joy(sticks) out of gaming with Steam Controller

Gaming house Valve has completed its trio of announcements for the week with news of a planned wireless game controller that replaces the traditional thumb-controlled mini joysticks with two force-feedback touchpads and a programmable screen. Steam Controller The touchy-feely future of gaming? The two touchpads will give …

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      1. Steven Raith
        Reply Icon

        Re: The chicken and the egg

        You mean no tactility except the positional banding (which is up for change depending on what beta testers say - may gets some nubs/depressions to compensate for lack of a d-pad) and the ultra high resolution haptic feedback (the highest bandwidth, and as such, variance of feedback, available on any consumer device as far as Valve are aware) which those who have used it have said works quite well, depending on the sort of game you are playing.

        You know, like Tommy Refenes, designer of Super Meat Boy:

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

        Generally positive for what (at the time) would be alpha hardware, and is now moving into beta, with lots more testing to come - and feedback. Lots of feedback.

        I'd expect more on this next month when (presumably) the beta units start rolling out.

        And for reference, you can use your keyboard and mouse, your XBox wired controller, or anything else that works on your PC with SteamOS as far as Steam are concerned - but they need joypad testers for the beta - hence the requirement of beta testers to have a joypad installed and configured under their Steam config.

        They need to test the primary market - the rest of us, should we go for SteamOS, can do what we want.

        I'll happily stick with a keyboard and mouse for FPS, but these controllers do look very interesting indeed....

        Steven R

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    2. Ragarath
      Reply Icon

      Re: The chicken and the egg

      Here's hoping the steambox is popular so it does for linux what the xbox does for windows - gives devs a platform/market to aim their games at. That you'll be able to run games on linux is happy side-effect.

      You want to limit Linux games to poor ports? Jeeze, you really have it in for Linux gaming.

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  2. Oninoshiko

    I've decided to reserve judgement until I can see one. I'm not expecting it to replace the control setup I've got setup from the one game I'm really waiting on.

    (HOTAS and Star Citizen)

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  3. PaulR79

    The real reason Ballmer was in tears?

    I read that he cried during some unimportant thing. Is it because he saw that Valve were doing more than blowing smoke when they mentioned looking at alternatives Windows 8 like Linux? Ballmer has done more to kill Windows and push people to other platforms than I ever thought possible and Valve look to be saying "thanks, we'll take it from here". I'm undecided on SteamOS but I figure at least that way if games developers build for one version of Linux you know it will work without needing to hunt through forums for solutions.

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  4. Mikel

    Half Life? What is this?

    Not a gamer, but this sounds interesting. I see that Steam on Linux has the whole series, so I may give it a try. If so many people are eager for the next installment maybe the kids will like it. Maybe the Valve Complete pack would be a better deal.

    This week has been awesome for Valve announcements. I can't wait to give SteamOS a try, am in the market for a Steambox when they come out, and the controllers of course. I'm hoping to get the kids into game modding and stuff while they're young enough to leverage it. Maybe I can sneak a little programming training in too, while they're impressionable enough to sway into Open. I understand the SteamOS is going to be a development kit as well as a console, and they can start with simple resource modifications. It will be a fun thing we can do together when it rains, which hereabouts is all the time almost.

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    1. Fibbles
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      Re: Half Life? What is this?

      Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are FPS games that are often regarded as having redefined the genre. There are many reviews out there that could tell you about them in-depth so I'll not bother here. I will say however that if you played them when they were released they probably still hold a place in you heart as 'one of the best games of all time'. If you play them now they're still good games but it'll be hard to see the innovation since world + dog have copied them (not that that's a bad thing).

      I wouldn't recommend them for your kids unless they're in their teens. There's some violence, as with any shooter, but the games rely more on their tense and often frightening atmosphere more than they do gunning down hordes of mooks. There's also the added bonus that the main protagonist is an experimental physicist rather than some dimwitted, muscle-bound, misogynistic mercenary.

      The Valve complete pack contains everything Half-Life related as well as some other great games (Portal1&2 and L4D1&2). The portal games are are based around physics puzzles set to the background of the player being a human guinea pig in a test chamber run by an AI that has completely lost the plot. The L4D series are zombie survival horror games. They offer some great co-op gameplay but I'd vet them first before giving them to your kids. They're certainly not intended for a younger audience.

      It's worth bearing in mind that Steam often has sales offering large discounts. You've just missed the giant summer sale where they slash prices on everything but they do still pick random games or series of games each week and reduce their prices. You might be able to pick up the individual games in the complete pack for a much lower cost. There are also third-party sites like GoG, GreenManGaming and GameFly Digital which sell keys to activate games on Steam but have their own sales at different times to Steam itself.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Half Life? What is this?

        "Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are FPS games that are often regarded as having redefined the genre."

        FPS? Whazzat? Fine Piece o'sh***?

        (sorry, I tend to play adventure games for the most part, like the ZORK and Myst series... but please enlighten me: what does FPS mean? Honestly!)

        Anyway, I have tried playing games with various controllers, and have found that nothing controls a game quite as smoothly as a keyboard does.

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        1. Fibbles
          Reply Icon

          Re: Half Life? What is this?

          "FPS? Whazzat? Fine Piece o'sh***?

          (sorry, I tend to play adventure games for the most part, like the ZORK and Myst series... but please enlighten me: what does FPS mean? Honestly!)"

          First-Person Shooter. Though to add to your confusion FPS can also stand for frames per second which is an acronym used fairly often in the FPS community.

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        2. Tom 38
          Reply Icon
          Trollface

          Re: Half Life? What is this?

          FPS? Whazzat? Fine Piece o'sh***?

          (sorry, I tend to play adventure games for the most part, like the ZORK and Myst series... but please enlighten me: what does FPS mean? Honestly!)

          Troll.

          Well, troll, or someone dense enough to a) post to a thread on a tech site about gaming and not know what a FPS is, and b) is incapable of googling for a definition

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    2. Tom 38
      Reply Icon

      Re: Half Life? What is this?

      Half-Life was game of the year for 5 years in a row (or should have been). If you've never played Half-Life, stop what you are doing right now, spend a few hours getting in touch with Gordon.

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  5. DrXym

    This looks like a bad idea

    Controllers have sticks for a reason - it gives a player precise control over position and feedback through the pressure and position of the stick.

    Touch sensitivity would be a very poor substitute regardless of it having ridges or haptic feedback especially since a finger's friction can change depending on whether it is greasy or dry.

    A lot of games already have 360 controller support. I have to wonder why they didn't produce something more akin to that. They could still stick a screen or touch pad in the middle.

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    1. MJI Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: This looks like a bad idea

      Touch pad = DS4

      One a PC I think I will stick to KBM and in the living room to a console

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The announcement was never going to be Half-life related, they were Steam-related announcements and a game announcement would've been out of place.

    Personally I was hoping for the last announcement to be 'Steam games now available on Android' (Where applicable, an ever increasing number of indie games are coming out for android on top of Windows/Mac/Linux and as Amazon have demonstrated, third party app stores on Android can work) which would have been nice.

    As for the controller well we'll have to see how much it costs (will there be a separate adapter that must be purchased like the Xbox wireless controllers or will it be bluetooth) and more importantly how it handles. Personally I'm not overly convinced by the idea of keyboard emulation when you have trackpads but it might work. Will they emulate analogue control through their emulated keyboard using PWM, and so on.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I wonder how long before they release an 'app' for the Xbone and PS4 so that the owners of those consoles would stream the games running on their PCs.

    Any way, I still haven't seen anything from Valve that will let me feel that this would be different from the other consoles in the market. Why would I want to buy a console running SteamOS when I have a nice PC running my games? And I can play the consoles exclusives on each respective console*. Just because it has the name 'Steam' doesn't mean it will be more than the other consoles.

    * Some PC gamers refuse to use consoles, which I find to be strange, there are some really good exclusives on the PS3, why would I not want to play them? Graphics? Never let that get in the way of a good game.

    Obligatory: English isn't my native language, for please forgive my EngRish.

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    1. Arthur 1
      Reply Icon

      one thing...

      One thing that springs to mind immediately on how this is different: the hardware is open, designed to be hackable, and designed for third parties to produce them. This is fundamentally different from any other console. It means that it may not function as a loss leader, a massive change in business model for the industry. It also means you can upgrade it over time like your PC, which is a big deal for the implications that has for graphics, physics and other bling. Consoles usually look great on launch day, but after two or three years they can get a little hard to look at if you split gaming time between console and PC. Steam games would presumably be designed to scale up quality on beefed up hardware like PC games.

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Arrogance

    The arrogance of people who judge this without trying it is amazing. I'm a PC gamer and I know that some games don't work very well with my Xbox 360 controller when speed of movement or accuracy come into play but that's exactly the problem that Valve are trying to address. How about you wait and see what it's like before declaring that keyboard and mouse is the only thing that's good enough?

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  9. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    WTF?

    Hmmmmm.....

    Ok, so I have a meaty and pretty noisy Windoze rig I use for games in the man cave, and a titchy and discrete Linux box (and the old Wii console the kids used to play on) in the lounge for media stuff because the lounge has the biggest and best TV in the house. But the media box is not going to be good enough to play real games on, and SWMBO will throw a fit if I drag my games rig into the lounge. And I don't see the point of putting another big TV in the man cave, it's simply not big enough a room (especially with the piles of junk and books I have in there!). The old Wii doesn't get enough usage that I'd consider wanting a replacement console, and I don't want a console in the man cave where I already have too many proper systems. So I'd rather just stick with Steam on a PC and use the old keyboard and mouse, thanks. I don't think even HL3 on console only would be enough to tempt me to buy one - after all, I withstood the urge with HALO all these years.

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    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
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      Re: Hmmmmm..... @Matt

      I would have thought that a SteamBox running in streaming mode from your gaming rig would be exactly what you needed to play games in your living room. Best of all worlds.

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      1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Peter Gathercole Re: Hmmmmm..... @Matt

        "....a SteamBox running in streaming mode...." Yeah, but no. Streaming = lagging like crazy, so pants for a lot of games. And my house has real internal walls so wireless is also pretty hit'n'miss, and I really don't want to start running cabling everywhere (did that in the last house, thanks). And then I have to keep a wireless keyboard and mouse in the lounge for when I'm not playing. Thanks, but no thanks.

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        1. Atonnis
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          Re: Peter Gathercole Hmmmmm..... @Matt

          Have you considered the more up-to-date powerline adapters? You can get some damn good speeds with them and they can make it so much easier to get data around the house....

          ....and streaming technology has come a VERY long way in recent years. Even nVidia are streaming PC games to their new SHIELD product (which I would seriously consider if it wasn't loaded to the gills with Google's shiteware).

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        2. Tom 38
          Reply Icon

          Re: Peter Gathercole Hmmmmm..... @Matt

          Did you even read the article Matt? What would you need a keyboard and mouse in the lounge for? There is no PC there, just your Steam Box console. You control this with your Steam Controller to stream games from your PC to your TV. No keyboard/mouse involved. Streaming from inside your house should result in sub 1ms lag, about a quarter of the time for your monitor to transition grey-to-grey - imperceptible, in other words.

          What it sounds like to me is that you don't want to play games on your TV in the front room, and therefore there is no console that you would be interested in, but thanks for coming on and having a good moan.

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  10. Clive Galway
    FAIL

    Gonna have to call a FAIL on this one.

    What controllers need is a TRACKBALL, not a touchpad.

    You cannot properly play an FPS with a touchpad, but you can with a trackball.

    This is why there is so much complaining in the console market about players with custom controllers whooping the ass of everyone else - IT WORKS!

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    1. MJI Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Gonna have to call a FAIL on this one. - custom controllers

      The amount of times you hear people moan, I play a PS3 FPS regularly

      "They have rapid fire" - actually I know that the gun they accused will not work with rapid fire controllers. The real cause is lag, and running peer to peer.

      This game is bad enough with 2 official controllers supported, one lot moan about the other, as a fan of the better controller I said just learn it.

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  11. ElectricFox
    Thumb Up

    Display

    This is where I think the Wii U got it wrong: a massive screen on one controller only. By putting a small cheap(ish) screen on each controller, you can have a private window for sociable strategy games played competitively around one big screen. I can see this being a real plus for bringing many popular board games to the television where you don't spend forever faffing about with little pieces.

    Regarding the trackpads, I suspect Valve has put a lot of testing, polish and thought into this, and dismissed many other possibilities that they were researching in favour of them. Finally, regarding cost, because this is all open source hardware, you can bring your own controller round to a mate's for a gaming session on a PC, or any number of steam consoles that will be released next year.

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  12. Mark McC

    Not convinced.

    Touch-based controls for gaming have never worked well for me, based on my limited experience of trying to control various Android games (and one terrible Amiga gamepad many moons ago). To paraphrase Charlie Brooker, it's about as responsive as prodding your fingers against the wall of a fish tank and hoping the fish move in the direction you want.

    But... Valve are a company who seem to be remarkably good at killing bullshit ideas before they ever get off the ground. If the project has gotten to this stage without being shot down, then I'm prepared to believe that the hardware implementation is something better than it seems and I'll reserve judgement until I get a chance to fondle one of the things.

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  13. TheFiddler

    "The Steam Controller also uses a central high-resolution touch-enabled screen that can display maps, allow users to scroll through menus, or just add extra buttons as needed for individual games. "

    Sounds like they are taking the concept of the old Jag Pads and updating them from a button-grid and game based overlay to something more modern. Still won't have me surrendering my keyboard and mouse though.

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  14. Grogan Silver badge

    I may be commenting from a different perspective here. I've only recently (in the last few years) gotten the hang of console controllers (Xbox360 and Playstation 3 at friend's houses), being used to PC gaming with a keyboard and mouse.

    Console controllers were purposely designed to be similar. They have similar buttons, triggers, sticks etc. so that game developers can use similar mappings for all the games, that users are familiar with.

    I don't want to have to learn to use a new type of controller all over again. It took me so long to even be able to move/aim/shoot in Call of Duty games with the XBox360 controller.

    So probably, I won't be getting one of those. It doesn't really make a lot of sense for me (in my opinion) to get a Steam Box anyway, because it's going to be PC hardware and you can build your own box for it and install your own OS. (either SteamOS or regular Linux distro with Steam client). So since it's essentially just PC gaming to me, there's little incentive for me to move away from the keyboard and mouse.

    I only PREFER a controller (e.g. I have an XBox 360 controller for my PC) for games where driving is significant. A controller is much better than a keyboard for driving (accelerating and steering), because the controls are incremental, not just on/off.

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  15. sabroni Silver badge
    Facepalm

    I can tell exactly how this will handle...

    ...just from looking at a picture. It'll NEVER be as good as a keyboard and mouse!

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  16. Crisp

    Damn you muscle memory!

    I can see my thumbs being all over the place on this device. How is it for accuracy?

    With the exception of a few flight sims, I've never been able to find anything more accurate for shooting stuff than WSAD and a mouse.

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  17. Benchops

    What's wrong with

    Q-LEFT

    W-RIGHT

    SPACE BAR-JUMP

    ?

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    1. Atonnis
      Reply Icon

      Re: What's wrong with

      You forgot..

      .......PROFIT!

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  18. Darkflame007

    The cost of games on the big screen

    So when doing a stupidly early to compare against my pre-ordered PS4 I get a system that all those indie companies who gave us fun games like Limbo & SPAZ can program towards! I can't wait for the Steam sale for the big screen, it's going to be epic. The price war has started and when it comes to the console its either going to be cheaper or better than the new PS4/Xbox one. Also you can problery make one yourself or a ton of PC builders will make you great option on an ever improving platform... I say we will soon see support for 4K TV gaming in full res!

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  19. JDX Gold badge

    Meh

    It looks ugly and why would I expect a company who's entire focus has been on PC (i.e. not joypad based) games to know anything about what makes a good joypad?

    Reads more like they just bundled tech into it to look cool. Ps3 controller is far better.

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    1. Greg D
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      Re: Meh

      And you got all this from a picture of a concept drawing.

      Yeah. Ok.

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      1. JDX Gold badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Meh

        They don't have any background in console gaming, and most of their games are not geared towards joypads; I don't need to see the hardware to know these things.

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  20. NomNomNom

    Console gaming is casual gaming. For more focused gaming you need a mouse and keyboard. Many games just don't work on console and unfortunately many games made today are being dumbed down so they work on both.

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    1. JDX Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Tell that to a parent whose kid spends 12 hours a day on FIFA.

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      1. Ragarath
        Reply Icon

        FIFA?

        You bring up a game that controls most of the moves for you when someone mentions focused gaming? Colour me confused.

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  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Keep going VALVe. As soon as you get my current Steam catalog of games (Currently 93) onto a Steam box that I can play on my TV, I'll be swapping to Linux full time.

    My Win 7 install is still there only because of my Steam games. I do everything else on Linux.

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  22. imanidiot Silver badge

    Am I the only one hoping

    they won't make a massive announcement for Halflife 3? Just a "ohh, btw guys, we're releasing HL3 in November. Just FYI"

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