As part of its quest to bring PC gaming into the living room, Valve now wants to totally reinvent the gamepad.
The company behind Half-Life, Portal and the Steam digital gaming service announced the Steam Controller on Friday morning, but it's not just a traditional controller with a few tweaks. In an attempt to make PC games designed around a mouse and keyboard interface fully playable in a living-room situation, Valve has rethought the handheld gamepad experience. Steam Controllers won't have a D-pad or an analog joystick, the two constant features of nearly every standard game controller since 1983. Instead, it will feature two trackpads.
'The trackpads allow far higher fidelity input than has previously been possible with traditional handheld controllers,' Valve wrote on the announcement page. 'Steam gamers, who are used to the input associated with PCs, will appreciate that the Steam Controller's resolution approaches that of a desktop mouse. Whole genres of games that were previously only playable with a keyboard and mouse are now accessible from the sofa.'
While the dual trackpads are certainly the most visually striking and fundamentally transformative elements of the new controller, Valve did not stop there. It added a touchscreen in the middle of the controller. There's advanced force feedback, which it calls a 'higher-bandwidth haptic information channel than exists in any other consumer product that we know of.' It's symmetrical, so that left-handed and right-handed players will never find themselves at a disadvantage.
And there are buttons, buttons everywhere. Each trackpad can be clicked like a button. The touchscreen can be clicked like a button. Valve says that there are 16 buttons total, and eight of them can be accessed without moving one's thumbs off of the trackpads.
Is this genius or insanity? Sure, it looks weird, but didn't we all think that the first time we saw the ridiculous three-pronged Nintendo 64 controller? It's tough to imagine how one might use it, but didn't we think the same thing about the Wiimote before we tried it for ourselves? And weren't we all sure that a phone without buttons would be horrible?
On the other hand, the most successful innovations in game controllers tend to simplify the experience, not complicate it. If you thought standard game controllers had a sharp learning curve, take a look at Steam Controller with its 16 buttons and dual trackpads. WIRED contributor John Mix Meyer messaged me a few moments ago to call this ' the Homer of controllers,' everything people say they want but might not actually want in practice.
Sure, it makes all PC games playable from the couch, but is that really something people will want to do? Will the war over the couch be won by making games suitable for the couch - or making the couch suitable for the games?
With Steam Controller, Valve's position is laid bare. Let's see if it turns out to be the right move.
