Steam Controller

For a long time, games on IBM PC compatibles were a separate universe where the keyboard and mouse were the most common game controllers. Analogue joysticks were mainly used for flight simulators. Little by little, action games from the console world started to find their way to the Windows operating system, and this was in no small part due to the Steam distribution platform. Valve, the company behind Steam, wanted to turn home computers into a console of sort; a key part of this project was the Steam Controller, released together with the Steam Machine device concept in 2015. The Steam Machine never saw actual sales, but the Steam Controller was available on Valve’s online store until 2019.

The controller is reminiscent of the Xbox controller, but it lacks a digital directional pad or a second analogue joystick. They are replaced by touchpads that provide the user with haptic feedback, a type of precise vibration. These two pads also allow for playing games that require a mouse.

In the end, the Steam Controller was not the breakthrough that was anticipated; this was largely because Microsoft’s wireless controller became a de facto standard of sorts for playing on Windows, and the haptic touchpad turned out to be less easy to use than an analogue joystick when the action got busy.