We won’t probably have any news regarding the upcoming Steam Machines (running with SteamOS) until the GDC in February 2015, but in the meantime in a recent Steam client update, one could find a new picture related to the upcoming Steam Controller. As a reminder, this is what the most recent iteration of the Steam Controller was supposed to look like:

As you can see, the main previous change was the introduction of an analog stick on the center-left side of the design. Probably to provide an option for action games instead of forcing everyone to use the trackpad on the left. The new iteration brings only a very subtle change. As you can see below, the left trackpad has been given a cross trace, probably to make easier to use for action games to ensure one gets the directions right. I bet this is driven by usability issues, since Valve’s previous choices were very much the result of rigorous testing.

While the change is minimal, this sends another hint: it seems that the controller is very much in its final design stage, as there was no major change this time around. if this is the case, we could expect the Steam Machines to be closer to an actual launch in 2015.

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