Valve has gone back to the drawing board and reworked its controller prototype for its living-room "Steam Machine" gaming computers. We should clarify, though, that one could also theoretically use a Steam Controller as a replacement for one's typical keyboard and mouse setup  up to you!

The company's tweaking should come as little surprise, given that Valve already teased out some of its changes at this past January's Steam Dev Days conference. What debuted yesterday is a much more accurate rendering of what the company plans to demonstrate at this year's Game Developers Conference next week. At first glance, it appears that Valve has really taken some of the early criticisms of the device to heart.

That, or the company is reverting a bit to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality of controller design.

Surviving Valve's redesign are the controller's two touch-sensitive trackpads that replace the more common analog sticks one might otherwise find on an Xbox or PlayStation controller (to name two examples). As before, these sit in the upper right and upper left sections of the controller, and they can be used as analog stick replacements or as simple trackpads for one's mouse cursor.

Joining these are four new directional buttons located in the middle-left of the controller's lower half. They remind us a bit of what it might look like if someone swapped the bottom and top halves of one of Sony's DualShock controllers.

The move now gives gamers a more traditional D-pad setup for a different kind of control in whatever games they're playing. We'd probably see ourselves using the D-pad more for fighting games than anything else, where the touch-sensitive trackpad might not feel as comfortable or accurate for gamers used to a more conventional setup.

Valve has also borrowed a page from just about every controller design in modern history by opting to place a new diamond-shaped, four-button "A, B, X, Y" layout to the right of the aforementioned D-pad. That's a bit of a departure from its previous design, which had these four buttons sitting around the corners of the controller's built-in touchscreen display.

Also gone? Said touchscreen display. Valve has axed this feature of the controller, preferring instead to concentrate three new buttons in the center of the controller previously occupied by the touchscreen. Two smaller buttons with "stop" and "play" logos sit on the left and right sides of a larger, lit-up Steam logo button, which we can only presume is the Steam Controller's version of a "Home" button that you find on most modern controllers.

Got it? The departures are a bit radical when you slap images of the two controllers side-by-side. For gamers, however, the changes bring Valve's controller more in line with that which is commonly used in the home console space  it might hurt the controller's innovative qualities a little bit, but we suspect it'll make for a more seamless gaming experience for those transitioning over to Valve's device.

For reference, here's the old controller:

And here's the new controller:

Further Reading

Game Controllers & Accessory Reviews