If you’ve been testing this week’s Steam Autumn Sale, you might need seen one explicit discount: the Steam Controller, Valve’s weird owl-eyed gamepad, had its value slashed by a whopping 90%. Unfortunately, there’s cause for that – they’re the final Steam Controllers that’ll ever be launched. If you haven’t grabbed by one now, that’s it. Tough luck. The Steam Controller’s dying heralds the ultimate finish of Valve’s “Steam Machines” efforts to carry Steam to the couch. Being neck-deep in VR, they haven’t fairly given up on {hardware} completely – however the dream of a PC for the lounge appears effectively and actually useless, for now.
Valve told the Verge that this week’s batch is “the last batch of these gamepads that will ever be made”. Valve have been flogging Steam Controllers for a discount £4/€5.50/$5 (not together with delivery) on this week’s sale. Looking at Steam nevertheless, it appears just like the final run has utterly offered out.
Dropping again in 2013, the Steam Controller needed to smash aside long-held notions of how gamepads ought to look, breaking from the custom twin-stick design for 2 large touch-sensitive eyes that provided extra correct monitoring. The Steam controller was additionally extraordinarily customisable and arrived with a set of Steam instruments to utterly reconfigure each facet of the pad. It took a hell of plenty of getting used to, however in principle it’d make enjoying EVE or Civ on the telly completely doable.
Like Alec famous in his review, although, I discovered the controller a bit underwhelming. Yes, it labored, however the pad feels garbage to carry. Surprisingly flimsy and low cost for one thing with Valve’s pedigree. Granted, I’m the daftie who actually likes the brick-sized Xbox “Duke”, so what the hell do I do know?
More than that, the controller’s supreme use case by no means got here up. It was fairly easy to arrange store within the lounge with the Steam Link, a streaming field launched across the similar time. But if I’ve obtained folks spherical for a celebration, we’re enjoying Mount Your Friends, Nidhogg or Towerfall, games that work completely tremendous with a 360 pad. If I’m placing within the hours in Stellaris or BattleTech, I’m gonna sit at my desk and get severe.
The Steam Controller was discontinued simply over a yr after the Steam Link, which has discovered new life as a mobile app. Other areas of the Steam Machines program (like partnered all-in-one PCs and the SteamOS working system) fizzled out lengthy earlier than ever actually taking off.
Ah effectively. Back to the 360 pad we go.
