You can assign very specific sections on it to in-game menu items, or sprint zones. But from there it doesn’t take a lot to make either pad work like a mouse, or a joystick, or to augment the joypad’s gyro for precision aiming. Initially, the left pad is a D-pad and the right pad is set-up as a virtual trackball, so you can flick your view around as if you were spinning a ball with your thumb. Tweaking the thumbpad gave an amount of precision I'd never had with a controller, and though I've never played anything competitively with it, with this I could play the Long Dark from my sofa. The first time I picked up the Steam Controller was the first time I could use a joypad to play FPS games. If you’re too used to thumbsticks you might never be ready for the trackpads, but I fell a little bit in love with them. Really, it’s the trackpads that will get you. I even managed to get Arma 3 working with it.
It was my go-to controller for any driving game, and it saw me through a lot of Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3. It's a jack-of-all-games, meant to let you comfortably smash out some Brawlhalla before thoughtfully tending to your space-empire in Stellaris. Valve only stuck a thumbstick on there because people were lost without it. The scoop-shaped controller is the inverse of everything that’s come before. If you set their pad down beside any other piece of gaming hardware, it stands out as an attempt to redefine gaming's wheel. That’s like fitting 30,000 square pegs into one round hole. It was meant to be a bridge between Steam’s huge library of keyboard and mouse focused games and the slouchy comfort of the living room. I now own three Steam Controllers, and a pair of official Xbox One and PS4 pads, and it's all down to Gabe's big-eyed, owlish experiment. It freed me from my PC a little, and made me enjoy joypads again. The Steam Controller made a fan out of me. The Steam Machines never took off, the Steam Link box was discontinued a year ago, and now the Steam Controller will no longer be made. They’d hoped to convince you to have a PC in the living room, or a small box for you to stream your library from your main PC. It’s the final part of Valve’s great Steam Machines undertaking to be shut down.
The Steam Controller assembly room is assembling no more, and with the recent Steam sale clearing out all the stock, the grand experiment is over. The power is off, the robotic limbs are becalmed, and the once thumping presses are depressed. Right now, there’s a room in Buffalo Grove, Illinois that's as quiet as a grave.
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