New Valve Release The Steam Controller And It's Genuinely Good: 'we...

The new Steam Controller is a smart way to play PC games on the sofa, stealing the Steam Deck's clever controls.

Valve has announced a new Steam Controller, called the Steam Controller, and I've given it a go. Valve has given its latest creation the same name as its previous star-crossed product, but this new model is going to be far less divisive than the original. Of that, I am absolutely sure.

The idea behind the Steam Controller is that it allows you to interact with your PC while on your sofa or away from a desk with the accuracy of a mouse, without actually requiring one. This is, and always has been, a good idea. Where people differ is on whether the original manifestation of the Steam Controller, first released in 2015, was any good or not.

I never used it for long enough to get to grips with it—which was, in large part, the problem with it. Some here at PC Gamer own the controller, but rarely, if ever, used it. Others here actively despise it. I imagine that represents a pretty good cross section of the wider PC gaming community. But it's important to note that there remains a small number of people that argue that it was, in fact, a good controller. It even has a 'Mostly Positive' rating on Steam to this day.

The original controller was discontinued around the time it became clear the Steam Machine dream was well and truly over, circa 2019. In its final death throes, it was put on sale for a frightfully low amount of money ($5/£4) and yet still failed to take off. The learning curve deemed too steep; the touchpads too weird; the thumbsticks too few.

This is not a problem with the new Steam Controller. Valve has done the very sensible thing, placing two thumbsticks where you'd expect them to be. Or at the very least, where PlayStation gamers expect them to be, as they are symmetrically placed within equal reach of your thumbs. There's good reason for this, as beneath each thumbstick sits a touchpad.

The Steam Controller's two touchpads are nearly identical to the Steam Deck's, albeit rotated slightly for a more ergonomic design. This is, of course, not a coincidence. The whole idea behind this new version being it allows a user that is docking their Steam Deck to have complete input parity with the handheld. Every layout available to the Steam Deck, each custom control scheme, the Steam Controller can do it too.

"We wanted it to feel familiar, so we targeted input parity with Steam Deck," Steve Cardinali, an engineer at Valve who worked on

Source: PC Gamer