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There was no queue for the Deck, I mean, there was, but that came after. Everyone was stuck in the same screen as Monday hitting refresh until we were able to get through. I started trying to buy mine on the dot and only managed to get it over 15 minutes afterwards. I didn’t get into the first batch because of that.
It has trackpad which allow you to play KB+mouse games very fluidly. Also they can be used to add radial or grid buttons to any game.
It has TMR sticks which means no drift and less power consumption.
It has a gyro.
It has 4 back buttons.
It’s fully compatible with steam Input so you can do crazy mappings of every single input.
It has capacitive sensors on the thumb sticks and handles so you can use that as input or modifiers.
It uses a dedicated dongle that has a latency comparable with plugged device according to some tests.
It also connects via cable or Bluetooth.
It’s very reparable friendly and Valve will be offering replacement parts.
It’s so good if you ignore
the price
Which is fair considering the features
the symmetric thumbsticks
Which some of us prefer.
the awkward trackpads
Which are the biggest selling point of the controller, if you don’t want trackpads an 8BitDo has almost the same features.
and the fact it only works on Steam games.
That’s not a fact, in fact it’s quite wrong. The controller works outside of steam normally, it’s just that it’s mapped to common desktop inputs which are less than useful for games butake total sense in a world where it’s meant to be used plugged to a PC and you might need to click your way through to open Steam. But there are open source programs to map the inputs to a controller which is essentially what SteamInput does. At least that’s what the OG controller did and from the reviews of the new one seems to be exactly the same.
And before you say “but you have to install a third party tool” that’s also true for other controllers if you want full features.
I barely managed to get one, had to spend well over 20 minutes spamming the continue button, because the first couple of times I passed that screen something else failed (they even charged me one of those times but the purchase didn’t finish, so I imagine it will get reverted in a while).
I liked my old steam controller more in theory than in practice, I still have it and use it occasionally but it’s more of a rarity when I think the features make up for the lack of d-pad and right stick. But the Steam Deck is just ideal for me, from the moment I grabbed it I have been wanting a standalone controller with that same format and inputs.
In any case, sorry you didn’t get one now, I’m sure they’ll be back in stock very quickly, it’s likely they did a small batch first to test the waters on how much people wanted this. But production is probably ramping up just like what happened with the Steam Deck.
Well, first of all an Xbox controller costs around 50 which is not a third of the price. Secondly the Xbox controller has literally less than half the inputs of the steam controller: Xbox controller has a d-pad, 2 joysticks, 2 triggers, 4 face buttons, 2 top buttons, play/pause buttons and the special power button; whereas the Steam controller also has 4 back buttons, 4 capacitive sensors, gyro, 2 trackpads (each of which on its own has a ridiculous amount of possibilities for usage) and 2 special buttons which are kinda irrelevant here. And that’s without mentioning the fact that TMR sticks are ridiculously better than traditional ones of the Xbox controller, or that the dongle works on a dedicated bandwidth instead of Bluetooth for the Xbox controller (because the dongle is sold separately I’m not considering it here, otherwise you need to add 20 to the total and then it’s DEFINITELY not a third of the price) so latency is much better.
Also, I’m not near a keyboard and mouse most of the time when playing, as I usually play on my TV. If I were near a mouse and keyboard I wouldn’t need a controller to begin with.
That’s a stupid argument, and it’s more of a thing Americans say to try to convince themselves that their system makes sense. Taxes are also different in different EU countries, some companies have different prices on different countries because of it, while others prefer to advertise to the whole community as a single market. Regardless, the price they advertise is the price you pay, otherwise it’s called false advertising.
Is this thing worth 5 third party controllers?
If you’re gaming on $20 controllers no wonder you don’t see the appeal here, it’s like someone saying “is an Nvidia 5080 really worth 5 Nvidia 3050s?”, completely different audiences.
Good controllers don’t sell cheaper than half the price of a steam controller, so you wouldn’t even be able to buy 2 controllers for the price of this. And there are plenty of controllers a lot more expensive than this that offer no benefits. Even the ones that cost half are, IMO, less than half as feature-rich, so yeah, definitely worth 2 Sony/Xbox/8BitDo controllers.
Are three of these worth a steam deck?
No, because the Steam Deck doesn’t cost 300, only the model they were burning stock did for a little while (that’s like saying the OG steam controller used to cost $5), and that model is no longer being made, so the question is are 6 of this worth a steam deck? But that is also kinda moot since it’s out of stock and might increase in price because of the ram shortage.
Exactly this, the fact that Valve makes the controller is mostly irrelevant to me (the only difference is that I trust Valve to deliver on their promises, other manufacturers I might wait a few months for reviews, and especially to see it it’s compatible with Linux and SteamInput). But if Microsoft or Sony, or 8BitDo had released a controller with these features for €99 I would have brought it too.
I’m not getting paid by Valve, in fact I will be giving them money for this controller as soon as possible. If you only play controller games then yeah, €99 for a controller with just 2 extra buttons and capacitive gyro might be too much (although, the capacitive gyro and extra buttons alone justify the price for me). But no other controller can be used to play mouse games comfortably. The trackpads might not be for you, but to claim they’re not worth it is naive at best, as they’re the ONLY good solution for this problem and no one else is doing them to be able to say “this other controller does the same and is cheaper”.
Ok, so you need to understand how devices interact with your system, in short they send sequential messages via the USB, your OS interprets those messages depending on what type of device it is. The piece of software that tells your system how to interpret the messages is what we call a driver. The original steam controller sent messages as if it was a mouse and keyboard, so you could plug it on anything that didn’t even had Steam installed and it would work, but not as you would expect it to. The “driver” was nothing more than a thin layer that just did a remapping of “button 1 means controller A, button 2 means controller B, etc” which is the exact same thing SteamInput does.
And the new controller is the same, I can now say this for sure because Gamer Nexus mentioned in their video that the controller works as a mouse on a PC without Steam. So yeah, bullshit, the controller works as expected eleven without steam, you should be able to go into your game and change the mapping and press buttons, it will be weird as the game will show you keyboard icons instead of controller, but the steam controller is not a normal controller so it can’t send the same inputs as other controllers which is somewhat limited.
In short the steam controller works even without steam, but without SteamInput to map what each button/gesture means it’s picked as a generic keyboard/mouse which is a deliverate decision to allow it to be used to control windows machines and reopen steam even if it closes. If it was mapped as a controller it wouldn’t be able to move the mouse natively because Windows doesn’t move the mouse with a controller by default.
it doesn’t make sense to put only one price without tax
That’s done because that’s the norm in the USA, if you advertise a price without tax on Europe you will be legally bound to sell at that price.
americans have less purchasing power than before not than europeans
I didn’t meant to imply that Americans have less purchasing power than Europeans (although they might, I don’t know) but rather than it’s common for companies to price things differently according to purchasing power and while the dollar did lose power that also means it’s people lost purchasing power so it makes sense to keep it the same price instead of increasing it to compensate as otherwise they might loose sales.
They did, a couple of weeks after launch. It wasn’t hard, it was just a USB device with lots of inputs so the software made a fake controller and allowed you to map inputs, it’s very likely the exact same software would work for the new controller for the inputs that both had. This thread is filled with fearmongering by people who have never held the OG steam controller in their hands and don’t understand this device.
Yeah, if Sony sold you a controller that requires playstation everyone would be up in arms… Ah, no, bad example, their controllers do require playstation and it is an open source driver that makes them work… I know! If Microsoft sold you a controller that requires Windows everyone would be up in arms… Ah, no, bad example, they already do and it’s an open source driver that allows it to work outside of it… I guess this is just more of the same? Except (I still don’t have mine so can’t fully confirm but would be surprised if it didn’t) the steam controller probably works just like a regular controller outside of Steam, you just lose SteamInput which is very important for this controller.
Yes, except it only sells on steam so you need an account to buy one. Also I’m fairly confident that it will just work outside of steam, just not full functionality as that depends on SteamInput for remapping and gestures. Most games don’t handle gyro, trackpads or back buttons on controllers so if you use this outside of Steam you won’t take advantage of those features. But I would bet that it will work as a regular controller even without steam.
Yeah, but because the price in the US is pre-tax the real price is around $108 which is still less than €99 but not by that much. Also, yeah USD is weakened but that also means people there are making less money so they have less purchasing power, it’s common for companies to price the same thing lower on low-income countries and higher on high-income ones to compensate.
I love my steam controller, but to me it wasn’t a good replacement for controller games. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great and the ONLY alternative to play non-controller games (and I put FPS games in this category), but trying to play most games that waere actually designed for a controller always felt off. The lack of a proper d-pad made it worse for pixel perfect games like Dead Cells, and while the track pad is great for aiming by emulating a mouse and adding gyro, most games also use the thumb stick for mini-games or something that feels weird with the track pad. And yes, I know I could setup layers to solve that, but it’s just easier to grab another controller.
On the other hand, since I held my Steam Deck I’ve been wanting a controller that was the exact same thing. It works 100% like a normal controller, plus has 2 trackpads and 4 back buttons. They fixed every single issue I had with the OG controller, kept everything I loved about it, and even added some things I didn’t knew I needed (extra back buttons, capacitive gyro, etc).
2.5 years life spam for a controller is a rip-off, that being said I have PlayStation 4 controllers that are waaaay older than that and still work (battery is not great, anymore, but I’m sure I could find a replacement). I don’t know what people do with their controllers, mine last for years and years, the only controller I have that actually developed an issue is one that I lent to a friend for a month.
Windows doesn’t usually need them as most games are native, and Mac doesn’t do Vulkan (in their immense wisdom Apple decided to invent Metal instead) so it can’t use dxvx. Valve could still have wine there which would work most of the time, but it might be a lot of support for a janky experience at beat.
It’s not just that, but I thought that replying to every single point would be too verbose. But you might be interested:
On the spesific spects computers they use.
On a big studio Dev’s hardware can be as varied as on the real world, and while yes they’re usually beefy PCs, they’re not at all uniform.
They need things like support for different resolution.
Which for the most part is just natively done by changing the render size of the canvas. Only some games, and almost never ports, take resolution into consideration for other things like menu layout and even then it’s usually just 2 or 3 different configurations.
Work arounds for the controller only features.
Usually the answer to this is “fuck it”, the only things a controller can do that KB+m can’t is rumble, and pressure sensitivity. Pressure sensitivity you get away by mapping two different keys, and rumble you get away with adding audiovisual queues (which you should already have because the rumble might be broken in the person’s controller). Also, controllers work on PC.
If you want to make things like mouse control feel good, it needs lot of fiddling.
Yes, but actually no. This is a solved problem for the most part, there might be some small tweaking needed but a mouse is very intuitive and usually just adding a couple of sensitivity sliders makes it so every person can control their experience at will.
Optimizing for million different hardware possibilities,
If only we had developed standards for hardware like OpenGL/Vulkan, and the OS abstracted most of the other things away for you.
error handling,
Do you think errors don’t happen on console? Error handling is error handling.
launching
Does the game not launch on consoles? Do you think every game needs a separate launcher on PC?
settings
Most of those are already there, the extra ones added are just about graphic control for performance reasons, so it’s usually just using downscaled versions of things or disabling features. And I guarantee you that most of that was in the game already because otherwise it wouldn’t run on Bob’s machine, they just needed to make a pretty UI for it.
key bindings
This is accurate, there might be a considerate amount of effort needed here depending on how lazy devs were. Most people know not to use input directly and abstract it through a layer of actions, but sometimes things slip through.
and propably million other things i cant think right now.
There are other things to consider, things like network stack and input handling are very specific for console development, and if you’re not abstracting them through your own APIs you’re going to have a bad time porting the game. But there are reasons to do this even if you will only ever use one API, so most games should already do that. Also, this is an engine level fix, once you do this for one game, every game using that engine gets that fix.
But hey, what do I know? I only work in the low level network stack for games.
Yes, but making a port of a game to a console involves using the console’s APIs for things. Things like input, network, graphics and others can’t use generic libraries in consoles like you can on PC. If you’re making a game on a modern game engine a lot of that is abstracted away for you, but if you’re working on a game engine or a game written from scratch you need to take these things into consideration.
There’s no way in hell those games don’t run on PC, you think every dev/artist/designer/etc has their own Playstation devkit for testing things? There was work needed, probably related to PSN and some other optional things that can be turned off for dev builds, but I guarantee you the games were running on PC before anyone even considered porting them.
Yeah, I don’t remember the specific books but there is a specific thing that I thought was brilliant. One book follows an Astartes that starts to suspect heresy in their ship and he escapes it, he approaches another ship and recognizes the Astartes on the other end of the radio and confides in him about his suspicion and he lets him onboard. Then in another book you follow the story of that other Astartes, who starts to suspect heresy in the fleet and when the radio call comes it confirms his suspicions.
Not the greatest thing ever, but it was a cool thing that I don’t think I’ve seen any other book series do something similar.
No it wasn’t, it used the same (albeit highly modified) engine, if that makes HL a mod then almost every game you play is a mod since they all use some preexisting engine. Otherwise you have to consider Marvel vs Capcom infinity a mod of Daylight since they’re both UE4 games, or even Call of Duty as a Quake mod.
You don’t need Quake to run Half-life, therefore it’s not a mod, it just uses the same engine, or some parts of. That is very different from Counter-Strike which you needed to have Half-life and mod it to be able to play it originally.
This is the moment where Valve should publicly announce they’re not laying people off, because they have enough cash to pay all of their employees by charging a fair 30% of every sale, which makes their business sustainable. Then point to all other platforms that charge 30% and say “they’re not firing anyone either” then get to the only one that charges 12% and say “they’re the only ones losing money on this business by trying to undercut the real cost of doing this business, if they had charged the same 30% as everyone else does they would have enough to keep those employees”. Probably a bullshit argument because Epic surely has enough money to keep them now and it’s just someone looking at a graph and making bullshit decisions, still a very strong point for Valves lawyers to make.
Yes, that’s precisely my point. The difference is in what the algorithm is trying to do, traditional DLSS uses the image rendered in resolution X as output and scaled down to X/2 as input (for example), so it’s trained to upscale images, whereas this new thing uses who knows what as either, and clearly outputs something that is not an upscaled version of the frame.
Because a pixelated circle being upscaled is a circle, but a pixelated circle being turned into a high definition pie is no longer a circle, and that’s especially problematic if the circle was just a cross hair or some other random circle like thing the AI thought was meant to be a pie.
Yes, both things are the same, but that’s like saying you had a tiny spider in your house and you were okay because it killed mosquitoes in your house, so you should be okay with having a colony of bats since they are also animals and eat mosquitoes. Yes, both are the same, but the scales and the amount of intrusion are completely different.
Yes, but getting into the queue had the same issues as the controller did now. I was also in the queue and it took me 17 minutes to get in it, which made it so that my deck wasn’t on the first batch even though I hit purchase the second it went live (as you might remember we had to pay a small fee to get in the queue, and processing those payments overloaded the servers like now). So, like I said, there was no queue, that came after you made the payment which put your name in the queue at the time you paid, if that’s your definition then the Steam controller also has a queue (assuming they prepare and send the orders in order).