This guy will have to wait for his younger brother.
It was available to buy starting noon local time. I refreshed the page until the buy option became available, but kept getting an error when submitting payment. Waited about half an hour and now it’s sold out. Ni modo I guess.
I genuinely don’t understand the hype beyond valve fanboyism. They already released a steam controller years ago and it was actually terrible, like there’s a reason no one else has even bothered to try and copy the track pad controller gimmick, because it’s just bad.
Not sure if you’re trolling, or have been living under a rock. This new controller is the same as the Steam Deck layout, which has been extremely successful and well received.
The lack of twin thumbsticks are what killed the original.
This one is better, but aside from better trackpad placement, it doesn’t offer a lot above the PS5 controller, which a lot of people already have.
Still, they sold out, so mission successful I suppose. I’ve no doubt the same thing will happen when I try and get a Steam Frame.
The main failure of the original controller was the lack of two thumbsticks (just like the PSP). While the track pads made a lot of PC games playable with a controller some games were worse with one thumbstick.
This controller fixes my main compliant, has a dedicated d-pad, and what looks like better track pads. So it’ll be perfect for playing around 90% of games with one controller.
This. The original Steam Controller did not meet the de-facto standard baseline for controller layout established by the first DualShock[1] that games have learned to expect and build their control schemes around.
The Steam Controller 2 does have everything in that layout. It’s modeled after the Deck’s layout, which is quite good.
Ignoring the analog button - which is not part of that “standard” because the software does not even need to acknowledge its existence - and the vibrations (which many controllers have, but are not required for input to work) ↩︎
The original controller is pretty awesome. It was also really really cheap. I love them because it’s the only controller for playing games that were not designed for a controller.
The original controller was great for its innovation. Especially when you got used to it all.
However, the build quality was very lacklustre. The back paddle on mine died in about 200 hours of gaming. After I fixed that the shoulder button went after another 100 or so hours. Fixed that. But within about 500 hours it was totally dead.
Whereas the 2nd hand ds4 I got from eBay that I fitted with my custom made back paddles gave me 2000 hours of rocket league before I had to do any tinkering.
I did over 4000 hours of RL in total and only had to replace the left thumbstick and put o rings over the shoulder button internals.
Do I want the new steam controller, yes. Would I buy one, no.
The original controller was like a concept car, lots of new ideas but not every one was guaranteed to stick. Plenty of them did stick though, like grip buttons and gyro control. The new controller is a more conservative iteration that takes what worked and drops what didn’t while acknowledging why the industry converged on the standard button layout all the way back in the late 90s. That’s exactly the sort of innovation I want to see.
Gyro control is still just a gimmick, but grip buttons are decent I guess.
But it’s still combining a controller and a kbm and ending up being worse than either one individually. And there’s only a very limited niche where a steam controller could be better than either on its own.
It’s like trackball mice, it just takes practice to get used to. Next to no one outside logitech makes them either but they are still genuinely good if it’s what you need.
Eh, I have my trackball from a more niche company, and it’s been fantastic. Their customer service was waaaay better than I expected from my experiences with logitech.
Also, trackballs are great. I can orient my hand any direction I want!
…but competitive fps is still beyond me. I need to catch 20+ years of mice usage to get the skill to par.