Valve Announces First Party Customizable Gamepad! Steam Controller Is Here!

by Shane O'HareSeptember 27, 2013

Today is the final day in the series of announcements from Valve and this one is a doozy. They are officially announcing their own gamepad! Looks like my prediction from Wednesday was right! Get eyes on this baby!

The Steam Controller really looks like it is the proper next step in video game input. No waggle controls, heart beat sensors or facial recognition. Valve has taken the greatest gaming controller, the Mouse and Keyboard and condensed them into a controller. The Steam Controller will work with all games on the Steam library, even the old ones!

The first thing you will notice about this gamepad is the dual trackpads. Each trackpad is super high resolution like that of a mouse, is clickable and opens up categories of games that were once unable to be played with a traditional gamepad. From the Press Release:

Whole genres of games that were previously only playable with a keyboard and mouse are now accessible from the sofa. RTS games. Casual, cursor-driven games. Strategy games. 4x space exploration games. A huge variety of indie games. Simulation titles. And of course, Euro Truck Simulator 2.

The Steam Controller will also feature brand new Haptic feedback. Featuring “dual linear resonant actuators”, they are saying that they will be able to deliver the kind of resistance that is missing from modern controllers and even might be able to improve on the Mouse and Keyboard!

Next we have the Touchscreen. High resolution, back lit touch screen is also one giant button that is clickable. It can be used to bring up menus, rotary options (Think weapon wheels) and even run entire in-game functions. One great feature of the touchscreen is the game integration. You won’t be forced to separate your attention between two screens. When you tap the touch screen it will overlay what it is displaying on the main screen!

Steam Controller Portal 2 Bindings — The Steam Controller will also appear as a standard Mouse and Keyboard so that you will be able to use it on OLDER games.

The best part? Is that this controller is totally open! Valve plans on releasing tools for consumers to edit the controller to their personal taste!

Personal thoughts? I didn’t really think I was going to be THIS excited for a controller, I was hoping for some #3 games (Hal-Life, Portal L4D). After reading over the entire release I honestly think Valve is making the proper next step in input. Being able to properly replicate the preciseness of a Mouse has been a goal of controller designers for YEARS. The best manufacturers were able to come up with were adapters that you plugged your mouse and keyboard in and up to your console, and even those were pretty sketchy. It’s hard to say how WELL they’ve done with this controller until we can get one in our hands, one which will be included in the hardware beta, but just from looking on their proof of concept I’d be surprised if this came out badly.

Feeling lost? Check out our Day 1 and Day 2 coverage of the year of Valve announcements!

UPDATED: Valve Announces Dedicated Gaming Hardware! Steam Machines BETA!

by Shane O'HareSeptember 25, 2013

This is the week of Steam! With the announcement of Valves dedicated OS on Monday, gamers and journalists alike started speculating right away what the next two would be. Well speculate no further! Valve has officially announced dedicated hardware, lets take a look at Steam Machines!

Valve is finally getting into the home “console” market. They are going to be partnering with hardware manufacturers (who those are have yet to be released) to create dedicated Steam Machines that will run Steam OS. There will be multiple devices available come 2014, but they have created a Beta device as a proof of concept. No pictures of the Beta, but they have listed instructions so that you could be one out of 300 people lucky enough to test the hardware. Instructions are as followed:

THE HARDWARE BETA ELIGIBILITY QUEST:

Before October 25, log in to Steam and then visit your quest page to track your current status towards beta test eligibility

1. Join the Steam Universe community group

2. Agree to the Steam Hardware Beta Terms and Conditions

3. Make 10 Steam friends (if you haven’t already)

4. Create a public Steam Community profile (if you haven’t already)

5. Play a game using a gamepad in Big Picture mode

No pictures of the Steam Machine has been released yet, but Valve is saying that it will be open and upgradeable (want to tear it apart and put a different OS on it? Sure go ahead!), and that there will be several options to choose from. They also state that this will NOT interfere with their PC market and you will not be forced to purchase additional hardware to continue using Steam.

This is a HUGE step in the direction for Valve. They’ve been a huge thorn in the side of home consoles for almost a decade now, and with Gabe Newells public disdain for companies like Microsoft, it’s obvious he wants to create a truly open platform.

Thoughts? Well, I am of course excited being a Steam/Valve fanboy, but at the same time I have to step back and look at this objectively. The concept of open gaming, much like Communism, sounds great on paper but in practice is hasn’t done so well. The Ouya is a perfect example of the “Open Gaming” platform and that hasn’t done to well. I believe Valve has the foresight to not fall into the same hole that Ouya did. A Steam Machine will of course lock you into Valves ecosystem, so those giant AAA titles like Battlefield and Need For Speed will still require you to saunter into the computer room and fire up Origin.

As more information is released we will be sure to keep you updated. Be sure to come back FRIDAY for the final bit of news from the company. What do you think it will be? Lets hope Half-Life 3, but with our luck it will be Ricochet 2.

UPDATE:

After some exploration I found THIS patent from valve. It depicts a controller/gamepad with user swappable components. It looks a LOT like the third picture, don’t you agree?

Still we can only speculate as to what will be presented Friday, but this looks like a pretty serious contender.

Steam OS Announced! A Free Operating System Built Around Gaming

by Shane O'HareSeptember 23, 2013

With next gen home consoles being released just around the corner, a lot of gamers have been wondering what’s next for PC gaming? Well look no further, for the collective geniuses at Valve have done it again. Check out Steam OS!

Steam OS is a 100% free Linux based operating system that is designed around the Steam digital distribution system. It’s goal is to bring the Steam PC gaming experience into the living room on your big screen TV. Valve says that they have achieved a new level of graphical processing performance, and they are well on their way to better audio and input performance as well. They state game developers and hardware manufacturers are making new products with Steam OS in mind.

Steam OS Livingroom — Bring a Steam Machine into your living room!

Four new features (well three new ones and one old one) that Valve is bringing to the table are: In-home game streaming, Streaming media services (Think Netflix, Hulu, ETC.), Family Sharing and Parental Controls. These are all bullet points you can find on any home console right now, having them on the Steam OS is a huge step in the right direction.

I expect to see hardware partnerships in the near future, specialized console sized PC’s from hardware manufacturers like Asus, Lenovo, HP and Dell. I’ve always said that the moment Gaming on a Linux based machine was on the level as a Windows machine (No need to run virtualization, emulation or shoddy drivers) I would make the switch. My big concern with the Steam OS is the In-home streaming. This makes me believe that not all games will work on the Steam OS and you will still need a second PC, and if at the end of the day that is the case I don’t see the need to switch right away.

There are still TWO more announcements coming this week, so be sure to check back Wednesday and Friday to see what Valve has planned next!