New Valve Steam Controller Details

The recent announcements from Valve that they have 65 million user accounts, then that they will be launching their own operating system, SteamOS, have been overshadowed with confirmation that they will be producing their own hardware platforms and controllers.

According to Valve’s Greg Coomber, the controller represents a radical departure from the existing methods of input devices used in gaming. “We wanted to accommodate the entire Steam catalog and give game players a way to control that catalog by holding something in their hands,” Coomer explained. “And we were focusing that particularly on helping people play games on their TV, in the living room.”

“It wasn’t so much about, ‘let’s build something better than the competition.’ It was a completely different design proposition, where our goal was around, ‘let’s serve this whole catalog and make something that enough Steam gamers can make use of, and let’s improve upon the capability of a traditional game pad in many genres of games, like first-person shooters,’” Coomer said. “’Let’s not just meet that bar. Let’s build something that can exceed it by quite a ways, especially in the fidelity of pointing and aiming.’ That was always a second part of our goal. The whole catalog, and then that improvement.”

Valve’s controller will ship to users selected for the hardware beta in 2014.

The company has also confirmed that it will reveal its hardware partners for Steam Machines along with their device designs at CES 2014 in January.

According to Valve’s Anna Sweet “We have 65 million Steam users. They’re a broad range of gamers. They all have different priorities when it comes to buying a Steam Machine. All our partners we’re working with are optimising differently for size, for price, for performance, for all those things you would expect. We think that’s great, because there’s a ton of different customers out there who want an experience like this, but have different priorities when they’re thinking about what they want to buy.”

As a result Valve say that the Steam Machine will consist of a variety of machines and in January they’ll start to be specific about how many boxes there will be, what kind of specifications they will have, and what kind of prices we can expect.