No prices yet. I may never financially recover from this.
The controller is exactly what I wanted. Take a Steam Deck, cut out the middle, glue the grips back together. Take my money.
And even then there’s some nice QOL features like capacitive strips on the grips.
Sometimes I think about how LOATHED Steam was when it launched. That was probably valid even. Still, it feels worth noting that Valve is maybe THE only company from my childhood that feels like it largely stayed true to its spirit, or whatever.
It happened to me (with blizzard)…and it will happen to you!
Dang. The new Steam Controller has a D-pad, buttons, thumbsticks, gyros, and trackpads.
And the thumbsticks are TMR (like Hall effect, but nicer).
As long as it’s comfortable to reach all that stuff, that’s gonna be a new bar for PC game controllers.
EDIT: and grip sensors.
EDIT2: and four haptic feedback motors, two in the trackpads.
I personally think the Deck is very comfortable given its bulk. I have a lot of faith in the controller ergonomics.
I posted this in the other thread, but wanna share here too:
Most interesting thing to me is the Frame apparently runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and is using SteamOS, implying official ARM support for SteamOS, Steam and Proton! Could mean steam and proton coming to android too.
It is fascinating and a huge step, but I want to keep expectations low. It will work, but it will not be as compatible as x86 Proton, not at all. It is first and primarily an OS for streaming games and running VR. That is the VR rendering from the streaming computer, not the VR game itself. In other words, they only had to get exactly one app to run well enough for public use. According to the developer, it is working with a surprising amount of games. I agree, one game is surprising, but trust me when I say you will not be running Windows x86 games in ARM Linux for a long time.
I think that for running games locally on the Frame, for anything other than games designed specifically to be gentle on a battery — and many games are not, unfortunately — you’re also really going to need to leave it plugged into a powerbank. The internal battery just isn’t that large relative to what the device can draw.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steam-frame-specs-availability/
The battery included on the Steam Frame is a 21 Wh model. The Snapdragon system-on-chip gobbles up around 20 W at full power—that’s how much it’ll likely use while playing a game locally in standalone mode. From this, we can expect around an hour of playtime without additional charge.
I want backpack sized battery banks.
You could probably put a 400 Wh powerbank in a backpack (search for “power station” on Amazon).
Attach a decent rumble pack and you have total immersion in your military/adventurer game!
