Instead of having people frantically trying to beat robo-scalpers through a system (predictably) crashing through surge of demand to purchase the item, people would be frantically trying to beat robo-scalpers through a system (predictively) crashing through surge of demand to put their name in a queue.
Have we forgotten that the exact same thing happened with the Steam Deck?
How do you think it would have gone differently if they had done this?
Yes, but getting into the queue had the same issues as the controller did now. I was also in the queue and it took me 17 minutes to get in it, which made it so that my deck wasn’t on the first batch even though I hit purchase the second it went live (as you might remember we had to pay a small fee to get in the queue, and processing those payments overloaded the servers like now). So, like I said, there was no queue, that came after you made the payment which put your name in the queue at the time you paid, if that’s your definition then the Steam controller also has a queue (assuming they prepare and send the orders in order).
There was no queue for the Deck, I mean, there was, but that came after. Everyone was stuck in the same screen as Monday hitting refresh until we were able to get through. I started trying to buy mine on the dot and only managed to get it over 15 minutes afterwards. I didn’t get into the first batch because of that.
It has trackpad which allow you to play KB+mouse games very fluidly. Also they can be used to add radial or grid buttons to any game.
It has TMR sticks which means no drift and less power consumption.
It has a gyro.
It has 4 back buttons.
It’s fully compatible with steam Input so you can do crazy mappings of every single input.
It has capacitive sensors on the thumb sticks and handles so you can use that as input or modifiers.
It uses a dedicated dongle that has a latency comparable with plugged device according to some tests.
It also connects via cable or Bluetooth.
It’s very reparable friendly and Valve will be offering replacement parts.
It’s so good if you ignore
the price
Which is fair considering the features
the symmetric thumbsticks
Which some of us prefer.
the awkward trackpads
Which are the biggest selling point of the controller, if you don’t want trackpads an 8BitDo has almost the same features.
and the fact it only works on Steam games.
That’s not a fact, in fact it’s quite wrong. The controller works outside of steam normally, it’s just that it’s mapped to common desktop inputs which are less than useful for games butake total sense in a world where it’s meant to be used plugged to a PC and you might need to click your way through to open Steam. But there are open source programs to map the inputs to a controller which is essentially what SteamInput does. At least that’s what the OG controller did and from the reviews of the new one seems to be exactly the same.
And before you say “but you have to install a third party tool” that’s also true for other controllers if you want full features.
I barely managed to get one, had to spend well over 20 minutes spamming the continue button, because the first couple of times I passed that screen something else failed (they even charged me one of those times but the purchase didn’t finish, so I imagine it will get reverted in a while).
I liked my old steam controller more in theory than in practice, I still have it and use it occasionally but it’s more of a rarity when I think the features make up for the lack of d-pad and right stick. But the Steam Deck is just ideal for me, from the moment I grabbed it I have been wanting a standalone controller with that same format and inputs.
In any case, sorry you didn’t get one now, I’m sure they’ll be back in stock very quickly, it’s likely they did a small batch first to test the waters on how much people wanted this. But production is probably ramping up just like what happened with the Steam Deck.
Well, first of all an Xbox controller costs around 50 which is not a third of the price. Secondly the Xbox controller has literally less than half the inputs of the steam controller: Xbox controller has a d-pad, 2 joysticks, 2 triggers, 4 face buttons, 2 top buttons, play/pause buttons and the special power button; whereas the Steam controller also has 4 back buttons, 4 capacitive sensors, gyro, 2 trackpads (each of which on its own has a ridiculous amount of possibilities for usage) and 2 special buttons which are kinda irrelevant here. And that’s without mentioning the fact that TMR sticks are ridiculously better than traditional ones of the Xbox controller, or that the dongle works on a dedicated bandwidth instead of Bluetooth for the Xbox controller (because the dongle is sold separately I’m not considering it here, otherwise you need to add 20 to the total and then it’s DEFINITELY not a third of the price) so latency is much better.
Also, I’m not near a keyboard and mouse most of the time when playing, as I usually play on my TV. If I were near a mouse and keyboard I wouldn’t need a controller to begin with.
That’s a stupid argument, and it’s more of a thing Americans say to try to convince themselves that their system makes sense. Taxes are also different in different EU countries, some companies have different prices on different countries because of it, while others prefer to advertise to the whole community as a single market. Regardless, the price they advertise is the price you pay, otherwise it’s called false advertising.
I don’t get how that output showcases anything, unless he had run that against a known instance of forgejo so the owners of that instance could confirm that he actually executed code. But he’s only showing a text file, that’s like saying look I hacked super_secure_self_hosted_service:
python hack_it.py localhost:3000
Hacked!
For all we know chain_alpha.py is just a bunch of prints.
Also, even if it is real (which I don’t really doubt, but I have seen no proof) holding the information instead of properly disclosing it is just childish. It’s not a carrot methodology, it’s a stick one, and one without a carrot. This is the sort of thing you do to big companies with no morals, doing it to a small open source project is just wrong, they don’t have the manpower or money to redo the investigation you already did. Release a CVE, talk to the devs, and/or push a PR, but saying “I found a vulnerability but I won’t tell you about it” is just dumb.
Is this thing worth 5 third party controllers?
If you’re gaming on $20 controllers no wonder you don’t see the appeal here, it’s like someone saying “is an Nvidia 5080 really worth 5 Nvidia 3050s?”, completely different audiences.
Good controllers don’t sell cheaper than half the price of a steam controller, so you wouldn’t even be able to buy 2 controllers for the price of this. And there are plenty of controllers a lot more expensive than this that offer no benefits. Even the ones that cost half are, IMO, less than half as feature-rich, so yeah, definitely worth 2 Sony/Xbox/8BitDo controllers.
Are three of these worth a steam deck?
No, because the Steam Deck doesn’t cost 300, only the model they were burning stock did for a little while (that’s like saying the OG steam controller used to cost $5), and that model is no longer being made, so the question is are 6 of this worth a steam deck? But that is also kinda moot since it’s out of stock and might increase in price because of the ram shortage.
Exactly this, the fact that Valve makes the controller is mostly irrelevant to me (the only difference is that I trust Valve to deliver on their promises, other manufacturers I might wait a few months for reviews, and especially to see it it’s compatible with Linux and SteamInput). But if Microsoft or Sony, or 8BitDo had released a controller with these features for €99 I would have brought it too.
I’m not getting paid by Valve, in fact I will be giving them money for this controller as soon as possible. If you only play controller games then yeah, €99 for a controller with just 2 extra buttons and capacitive gyro might be too much (although, the capacitive gyro and extra buttons alone justify the price for me). But no other controller can be used to play mouse games comfortably. The trackpads might not be for you, but to claim they’re not worth it is naive at best, as they’re the ONLY good solution for this problem and no one else is doing them to be able to say “this other controller does the same and is cheaper”.
Ok, so you need to understand how devices interact with your system, in short they send sequential messages via the USB, your OS interprets those messages depending on what type of device it is. The piece of software that tells your system how to interpret the messages is what we call a driver. The original steam controller sent messages as if it was a mouse and keyboard, so you could plug it on anything that didn’t even had Steam installed and it would work, but not as you would expect it to. The “driver” was nothing more than a thin layer that just did a remapping of “button 1 means controller A, button 2 means controller B, etc” which is the exact same thing SteamInput does.
And the new controller is the same, I can now say this for sure because Gamer Nexus mentioned in their video that the controller works as a mouse on a PC without Steam. So yeah, bullshit, the controller works as expected eleven without steam, you should be able to go into your game and change the mapping and press buttons, it will be weird as the game will show you keyboard icons instead of controller, but the steam controller is not a normal controller so it can’t send the same inputs as other controllers which is somewhat limited.
In short the steam controller works even without steam, but without SteamInput to map what each button/gesture means it’s picked as a generic keyboard/mouse which is a deliverate decision to allow it to be used to control windows machines and reopen steam even if it closes. If it was mapped as a controller it wouldn’t be able to move the mouse natively because Windows doesn’t move the mouse with a controller by default.
it doesn’t make sense to put only one price without tax
That’s done because that’s the norm in the USA, if you advertise a price without tax on Europe you will be legally bound to sell at that price.
americans have less purchasing power than before not than europeans
I didn’t meant to imply that Americans have less purchasing power than Europeans (although they might, I don’t know) but rather than it’s common for companies to price things differently according to purchasing power and while the dollar did lose power that also means it’s people lost purchasing power so it makes sense to keep it the same price instead of increasing it to compensate as otherwise they might loose sales.
They did, a couple of weeks after launch. It wasn’t hard, it was just a USB device with lots of inputs so the software made a fake controller and allowed you to map inputs, it’s very likely the exact same software would work for the new controller for the inputs that both had. This thread is filled with fearmongering by people who have never held the OG steam controller in their hands and don’t understand this device.
Yeah, if Sony sold you a controller that requires playstation everyone would be up in arms… Ah, no, bad example, their controllers do require playstation and it is an open source driver that makes them work… I know! If Microsoft sold you a controller that requires Windows everyone would be up in arms… Ah, no, bad example, they already do and it’s an open source driver that allows it to work outside of it… I guess this is just more of the same? Except (I still don’t have mine so can’t fully confirm but would be surprised if it didn’t) the steam controller probably works just like a regular controller outside of Steam, you just lose SteamInput which is very important for this controller.
Yes, except it only sells on steam so you need an account to buy one. Also I’m fairly confident that it will just work outside of steam, just not full functionality as that depends on SteamInput for remapping and gestures. Most games don’t handle gyro, trackpads or back buttons on controllers so if you use this outside of Steam you won’t take advantage of those features. But I would bet that it will work as a regular controller even without steam.
I call bullshit on that. The OG controller also “doesn’t work outside of steam” and “requires steam for full functionality”, but two weeks after lunch we already had open source projects that handled it, the same thing will happen here.
Yup, this is not going to replace KB+Mouse, but it is the closest we have been able to get in a controller form factor, so if you want to play on your TV in the living room this unlocks many games that you simply couldn’t play before.
In short if you don’t care about controllers then you shouldn’t care about this, but as far as controllers go it’s, IMO, the best there is by a LONG shot.