Valve isn’t getting into the hardware business lightly. While some consider the Steam giant’s sudden interest in physical boxes to be out of left field, the company has actually been researching the hardware space for nearly two years, making strategic hires and preparing itself for longer than most consumers realize. With its own OS in the works and the recent news that Steam has 65 million accounts , the house that Gabe Newell built is set to make a big splash when it enters the hardware race sometime next year.

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“ We like to go out and tell people, ‘PC’s awesome. It’s the home of innovation.’ But in the area of input that just wasn’t really true.

A small sample of Valve’s controller prototypes.

“ We wanted to accommodate the entire Steam catalog and give game players a way to control that catalog by holding something in their hands.

An early design that included a physical trackball and traditional analog stick.

“ We’ve never shipped hardware or written firmware ourselves, but we had a lot of confidence that we could attack that problem.

A mock-up of Valve’s touch-only prototype.

“ We said, ‘touch is fantastic. Let’s throw out all buttons and make a touch-only controller.

A mock-up of Valve’s final controller design.

“ If we weren’t [open to feedback], it would kind of be a facade to open up the beta.

Following recent announcements that Valve will work with partners to create Steam Machines and will build its own Steam controller , IGN visited Valve’s headquarters to speak with Greg Coomer, Eric Hope, and Anna Sweet to learn about the process behind how Valve built its debut hardware, plus the problems it still needs to solve moving forward.“We began thinking about input in an open-ended, not terribly directed way," Coomer told IGN. "We were thinking a lot about VR and how input needed to evolve in order to accommodate wearable computing and virtual reality. Not very many people were working on it, but it was an interesting area of exploration. We were coming at it just kind of throwing darts at the wall, trying stuff out to see what seemed like it made sense.”According to Coomer, the process didn’t begin by looking at something like the Xbox 360 controller and thinking about how to improve it, but instead by thinking about the nature of input and what made the most sense on a fundamental level.And “try stuff” is exactly what Valve did. In the nearly two years Valve has been working with hardware and thinking about the living room experience, dozens of prototype controllers were considered, and to this day the team is still experimenting with wearable computing and all kinds of various other input devices. To start, though, they knew they had to make a gamepad if they wanted to offer Steam users a more focused, pick-up-and-play experience.“We wanted to accommodate the entire Steam catalog and give game players a way to control that catalog by holding something in their hands,” Coomer explained. “And we were focusing that particularly on helping people play games on their TV, in the living room. It was that clarity that really made us focus our efforts, not on open-ended experiments and ‘what could we do if the sky’s the limit?’ but instead, ‘let’s do an inventory of what is required for playing all Steam games, even if you’re doing it from the sofa.’ In the den, you have about 104 keys on a standard keyboard, and you have a massively high-resolution 2D input surface. That’s pretty awesome for PC gaming, but it’s a lot to try to replicate or bring over to a space where you don’t have those devices and you’re holding everything in your hand. But it did help us focus our design efforts.”“It did a lot of what we were looking for,” Coomer said of the physical trackball. “It let you push a mouse cursor around a screen. It let you aim more precisely than a thumb stick let you aim in first-person shooter games. It was rough, but it was a step in a pretty interesting direction for us. It felt like it was a successful first prototype.”From there, Valve experimented with trackballs of different sizes, and even tried embedding a long, thin touch screen at the bottom of one prototype that let players swipe through pages of virtual keys to perform various commands. “Paging through things wouldn’t allow as quick of access as you would have on your desk with a physical keyboard, but it would go a long way toward providing at least accessibility for playing games that wouldn’t otherwise be playable with just a handheld device,” Coomer explained.Valve looked closely at traditional gamepads and decided that the small overall percentage of Steam games that support that type of input are already served well by existing devices like the Xbox 360 controller. Instead, the team wanted to focus on having all Steam games comfortably playable with the new controller.Valve soon found that by simulating a trackball rather than using a physical one, it had more control over the experience. “This kind of device is one that is more controlled by software than by physics,” Coomer said, holding up a controller more reminiscent of the final product. “We could modify the kind of experience that’s possible when you’re touching this sort of surface, much more than we felt like we could modify the experience that’s possible when you’re touching [a trackball]. By making this more of a software problem, we felt like it was far closer to home for us, and far more likely that we were going to build the right kind of solution for customers. We know how to build software. We’ve never shipped hardware or written firmware ourselves, but we had a lot of confidence that we could attack that problem and start making it better.”Once the team realized that a virtual trackball run by firmware worked better than a physical one, it decided to replace the traditional analog stick with a second trackball instead. Valve eventually brought back a new version of the narrow touch-strip it experimented with earlier, and at one point considered making the controller a touch-only device altogether.“We were sort of giddy at this point. We said, ‘touch is fantastic. Let’s throw out all buttons and make a touch-only controller,’” Coomer remembers. “’Maybe even touch surfaces on the back. Every button is virtualized. Let’s have all 104 keys.’ We were kind of entranced by it at first. But that was short-lived. There was even the notion of a phone. Not really a phone, but a Steam communication core that we were going to put in different input devices. We built some functional prototypes of that, not just mockettes like this, and tested it out. It was pretty cool, what we thought we could accomplish, but it felt pretty quickly like we’d gone off the reservation a little bit. We’re focusing now on accomplishing different goals. This felt like a future controller that might serve a new generation of games that was meant to target this kind of device while you’re looking at a TV. It’s not really what we were after. So we reined ourselves in and we came back to something that was much more like [the final controller].”“Early, when we were doing the trackball experiments, we quickly realized how valuable physical feedback was,” Hope explained. “There’s this data channel through the tips of your fingers that your brain immediately taps into. It’s really valuable and interesting. When we went to the track pads, which were more scalable and mutable – they could become anything – we lost that physicality. And so then we started looking at ways to bring that physicality back. We ultimately ended up with linear resonant actuators. And so they’re like small solenoid pistons that can deploy at various frequencies and intensities. That let us simulate lots of different textures or zones. It lets you know if you’re touching a virtual button or crossing a virtual zone. We got a lot of that physical haptic feedback back once we employed those in the track pads.”Hope elaborated on Valve’s previous claims that the trackpads can also operate as speakers, explaining that while a trackpad “doesn’t necessarily make for the most ideal speaker surface,” it is able to emit a small amount of sound. “It’s better than a piezo kind of effect,” he said. “If you were to play a human voice it would be somewhat distorted. It’d sound more like GLaDOS than a normal person. But we think it’ll be interesting when partners start to play with the direct API and they experiment with it.”Coomer and Hope explained that Valve is “absolutely” open to feedback from the beta, with Hope explaining that “if we weren’t, it would kind of be a facade to open up the beta.”“If we find out that there’s a necessary change that means a radical redesign of the controller, we’re going to make that decision just the same way that we have with all of our other products,” Coomer said. “We may find that out. We feel confident that we’ve done enough internal testing to know that we’ve got a good platform and that we’re probably going to be enabling enough good experiences. People aren’t going to want to just throw it out the window entirely. But we think we’re going to learn a lot. We’re super open to that.”