In early February, there was a minor controversy surrounding the critically acclaimed strategy sim, XCOM 2. It turned out that the game, which most people play with a mouse and keyboard, would only be supporting one type of joypad: Valve’s idiosyncratic Steam Controller.

Launched in November alongside the new range of Steam Machine PCs, this ambitious and innovative control device has provoked a range of reactions – though confusion seems to be the most common. Featuring two large HD haptic track pads, a single analogue thumbstick and an array of buttons (including two on the inside edges of the pad’s handles), the Steam Controller is designed to bring the precision controls of the mouse/keyboard combo to a handheld form factor. Each of the touch pads, for example, features haptic feedback, allowing you to sense where your thumb is on the surface, rather like moving a mouse around on a desktop.

The controller looked interesting to many PC gamers, but few were convinced it was the future. While Valve changed the whole course of the PC games industry with its Steam online store, where players are able to browse and download hundreds of titles, pundits have been less convinced with the company’s spin-off concepts. The Steam Machine PCs (which Valve doesn’t make, it just provides the feature set) are deemed over-priced, and the controller … well, folks just think it’s odd. It’s an outlier.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Steam Controller is designed to bring the precision controls of the mouse/keyboard combo to a handheld form factor. Photograph: Valve

So why was Valve so keen to make this thing? The Seattle-based company used to develop games like Portal, Half-Life and Left 4 Dead, before concentrating on its digital distribution business. Now it exists in strange liminal zone between software developer (it still makes the popular Dota 2 game), online store and hardware pioneer. What this controller is all about is a question that gets right to the heart of what Valve itself actually is.

“We had this really interesting challenge,” says Robin Walker, a veteran coder and designer who has been on the Steam Controller project since its inception three years ago. “We had to find this design that worked for the largest library of games that any device has ever attempted to deal with, but at the same time it had to be somewhat future-proof. One of the great things about the PC is that this is where all the innovation is happening, whether that’s virtual reality or new business models. We don’t know what’s going to happen next but we want to have a controller that can survive whatever the next steps are.”

This is a key element of the Valve philosophy: to be slightly ahead – or at least outside – of current thinking. When the company first announced its Steam platform in 2002 there was some initial resistance; there was nothing similar out there for the PC and besides, Valve was already making plenty of money with its games. Why change?

“At any point in our history the thing that was being the most successful from a business perspective at some point was the thing that made no sense if you looked at it from a pure accounting perspective,” says Walker. “It takes cultural effort to make sure we don’t fall into an easier way of thinking. It’s scary to say ‘I want to work on this thing and other people want to work on it too, but we don’t know if it’ll make more money’. It’s certainly scarier than thinking ‘I’m going to work on that thing because it’s making a lot of money and I can add another percent’. The problem is, if you take that approach, it kills our company within some number of years.”

Valve has always been good at figuring out what gamers are doing and then working out where it will lead. Back in the early days, when ex-Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington first formed the company to work on the first-person shooter Half-Life, they immediately noticed that there was this whole modding community attached to the genre: fans were creating their own levels for hits like Doom and Quake, even expanding these into spin-off games. So Valve employed the developers of the Quake mod Team Fortress and released the game as a standalone title to significant success and acclaim. The game was then regularly tweaked and updated for the next decade, responding to the needs and wishes of fans. Valve understood the value of customisation, iteration and community way before the smartphone games industry took those values to its very core.

We’re very interested in trying to make hardware more like software

This concern with customisation and iteration is a core element of the Steam Controller design. The pad is configurable to work with titles that weren’t designed to support it; players can go through a process of realigning the controls by matching them to the game’s own set-up, or they can download a configuration worked out and shared by another player.

“We had to build a system that allowed you to configure a controller to handle all these old games whle also letting you play new games in a different way,” says Walker. “We wanted to make sure we supported all that at a level above the game, so it doesn’t matter what you’re playing, you get that power.”

Importantly, however, openness to customisation isn’t restricted to button configuration. Another concept that Steam Controller symbolises is the transfer of software philosophies – ease of iteration, consumer customisation – to hardware.

“We’re very interested in trying to make hardware more like software,” says Walker. “With a traditional controller, people think of it as a solely physical object: you build the hardware, you build a thumbstick and the thumbstick says ‘I’m being pressed right’, and that information goes to the game. But there’s actually a huge software layer that’s doing a lot of work: how you interpret and filter for things like my thumb slipping off the pad; or if you want a character to move sideways, well, the reality is no one moves their thumb perfectly horizontally, so how do you adjust for that? It’s all software work.”

Like its software, Valve wanted the controller hardware to feel configurable too. “Our games are better today because we have created many channels, like Steam itself, where communities can get their hands on software and improve it,” says Walker. “A lot of the thinking behind Steam was: how does the internet make you better?



“This can be the same for hardware. We have a bunch of ideas on how to create those channels – so it’s things like, you can go onto our site and download all the CAD files for the controller; you can buy all the electronic guts from us so you can build your own form factor. We could have a workshop where people upload their own form factors so if you happen to have access to a 3D printer, you can just print a controller that someone else has designed.

“We’ve done a lot of work over the years on supporting various disabilities. When you get a large enough audience you’re going to have a lot of customers with specific challenges: colour blindness, for example. We’re really excited to see what effect those people will have when they start playing around with the controller. Often we find that when we ship stuff, it’s the community that makes it better, it’s like a juggernaut, we want to see where it goes.”

This is already happening. YouTuber Ben Heck, who specialises in hardware hacks, has built his own alternative controller based around the innards of Valve’s pad, and although rough, it’s interesting:

There’s also something else that Steam Controller helped Valve to prepare for. During its development, the company added HD haptic feedback to the trackpads, but it also built in a gyroscope for motion tracking. This has since been used by first-person shooter fans to handle things like jumping, peeping around corners and other specific movements (there’s an interesting example here with Dead Space 2), but of course, including this combination of physical controls into the product has made it a perfect testbed for another of Valve’s emerging interests: virtual reality. The company has teamed up with manufacturer HTC to produce the much-lauded Vive VR technology, which is due for release later this year.



“When we started to think about VR, we began by almost literally cutting a Steam Controller in half and putting one of the thumb pads in each hand,” says Valve’s business development manager, Eric Johnson. He puts Vive on a philosophical throughline that links Team Fortress, Steam and the Controller. “We view VR as on the spectrum of what an open platform can end up producing. If you bought Team Fortress 2 on a console, well, that game is gone now – but it is still growing on PC. That’s not because we had some masterplan, it’s just that, on PC, we had the ability to keep taking it in whatever direction made sense to our customers. Open platforms are really important to us because we can do Steam Machines and VR and new controller designs, then just ship them and see what happens.”

The future of the Steam Controller is perhaps uncertain. If we see more strategy games like XCOM 2 embracing it, if we see indie studios fiddling with its more esoteric capabilities (Walker says developers like Tommy Refenes, the co-creator of Super Meat Boy, played a role in testing the device), then it could take off.

Right now it’s a curiosity that co-exists alongside another curiosity: the Steam Machine. But for Valve watchers, and everyone interested in video games, the controller says a lot about how this company develops stuff. It hires polymaths who can switch easily between projects, and then restlessly experiments. “No one on the controller team came to Valve to build a controller,” says Walker. “One of the main people started as a level designer at another company, then went off to do hardcore particle effects and game design, then came to Valve. He programs, he did level design on Half Life 2 – but he’s spent the last two years writing code for the controller.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Valve’s work in virtual reality was aided by the development of the Steam Controller, which influenced the two control devices used with the HTC Vive. Photograph: Ritchie B Tongo/EPA

What has happened with Steam Controller is also a perfect symbol of the Valve business model. “A controller is quite a complicated thing,” says Johnson. “You have a bunch of choices when you manufacture something and a lot of those are trade offs between flexibility and cost. We took the maximum flexibility choice because if we’re building hardware and we’re targeting the PC, which is this really open system, we can’t necessarily anticipate the things we’re going to need to build very far in the future.

“So we said, let’s build a manufacturing line that’s considerably more expensive but lets us create whatever we want in the future. That’s kind of the Valve approach. We always try to make long term decisions, and that applies to manufacturing hardware or hiring hardware people. We didn’t bring in a third-party company to solve all our hardware problems. We approached it like we approach everything else: these are our customers. We’re kind of control freaks when it comes to our customers. Hopefully in a good way.”

But perhaps the clearest message this strange contraption sends out is that Valve remains a company of geeks. Even while controlling the dominant force in PC games distribution, making $1.5bn a year in revenue, it is still toying with the industry as though it’s an amusing sandbox simulation. Vive, like the Steam Controller, may turn out to be an expensive, fascinating oddity. But that won’t stop Valve. This is a company of very clever people who enjoy the process of making stuff.

“We have robots stamping out our hardware now,” says Walker, almost wistfully. “There was some sadness from the hardware focused people when they tried to get the rest of us excited about the fact that the controller assembly line is 100% automated. They said this is the most automated assembly line in the US. They even sent us video evidence. We were like ‘aren’t all controller assembly lines automated?!’. That made them very sad.”