Steam Controller Drops Touchscreen 84
An anonymous reader writes "Last year Valve announced a new game controller that was trying to innovate on the designs that have been with us for over a decade now. The biggest changes were replacing analog sticks with circular touchpads and plopping a small touchscreen into the middle of the controller. Valve has now revamped their prototype hardware, and the touchscreen is nowhere to be seen. In its place are stop/play buttons (which appear similar to start/select buttons) and a bigger Steam logo button. They've also moved around the directional and ABXY buttons, reverting to a more traditional layout (picture). They'll be demonstrating the latest prototype next week at GDC."
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Making a competively priced gaming PC (steam machine) compared to consoles is hard but doable
Especially given that the Nintendo 64 was a stripped down SGI Indy, and the original Xbox, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One are made with PC parts.
throw in a controller with an expensive touchscreen and it becomes impossible.
What does this say about the Wii U GamePad?
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What does this say about the Wii U GamePad?
I'd posit that the Wii U sacrificed a significant amount of hardware in their console for the sake of that fancy gamepad. Even with this new console generation's modest hardware barely being able to render at HD resolutions, the Wii U is still a generation behind. That's not necessarily a criticism, mind you... it's a choice that you have to make about the realities of pricing and hardware specs. Nintendo obviously isn't trying to compete in the high-specs console market, and that's fine. They choose to innovate in other ways.
Valve has to make the same choices regarding price and hardware tradeoffs. Keep in mind that it might not only be about price - it could be that the touchscreen wasn't living up to their expectations in terms of performance. As such, why not go with a tried and true (and cheaper) alternative. After all, the big three have kept their analog sticks and D-pads all this time. There's surely a reason for this other than history or momentum.
It was a pretty bad choice (Score:3)
Not the lower res/graphical fanciness, but the controller. It isn't that much fun to use as a controller because, well, it is fucking huge. It is a tablet. Thing is, if people wanted to play games on a tablet they'd probably do so and on one that could travel around with them.
Also it is pretty expensive. The screen, wireless interface, processor, all that jazz costs quite a bit and pushed up the cost of the Wii U. Part of what made the Wii successful was that it was really cheap compared to the "big 2" cons
Both buttons and a touch screen (Score:2)
if people wanted to play games on a tablet they'd probably do so and on one that could travel around with them.
Touch-screen tablets are good for positional input. But some game genres are more suited toward directional input than positional input, especially things like platformers and fighting games. Trying to do directional input with a touch screen is painful, as shown in the demo of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure. The advantage of Wii U GamePad over a tablet is that it has both traditional gaming controls (a directional control and discrete trigger buttons) and a touch screen. Only a few uncommon mobile device
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This. Every game I play I reach for the Pro controller instead. I don't use the Wii U controller unless I absolutely have to with one exception, when the TV is busy.
It is quite neat having the ability to keep playing on the controller if the TV suddenly becomes occupied and in those few cases turning the console into a portable was actually quite neat.
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I'd posit that the Wii U sacrificed a significant amount of hardware in their console for the sake of that fancy gamepad.
They did. I'd still have bought one but it doesn't support 4 controllers with displays. That was a massive failure.
Why sell one copy when you can sell four? (Score:2)
I'd still have bought one but it doesn't support 4 controllers with displays. That was a massive failure.
How many controllers does a typical PC game support, with or without displays? It's been claimed that PC game developers leave out support for split-screen play and spawn installation on purpose, in order to sell multiple copies of a game to one household [cracked.com].
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah but Steam sales mean we PC gamers really don't have to care
I thought the expectation that PC gamers would wait for a Steam sale was devaluing PC gaming. This allegedly causes publishers to believe they can't get much more revenue from a Steam bargain hunter than a copyright infringer, which encourages established developers to concentrate on consoles and treat PC as an afterthought. Apparently PC gamers are more likely to wait for Steam sales than PlayStation gamers for Greatest Hits. (References: 1 [slashdot.org] 2 [slashdot.org])
I also thought one had to have multiple Steam accounts in ord
When CL pickups turn violent (Score:2)
My oldest has a hexacore with 8Gb of RAM and a TB HDD and it only cost $350 shipped
Or $1,400 plus monitors plus OS plus furniture for four players.
you have a system that will play console games going back to the Atari 2600
Good luck dumping your authentic game cartridges to create the ROM files you need to play your console games. Last time I checked, Retrode was discontinued indefinitely [retrode.com].
and of course web, video, hell you can even get your work done on it
As for work or other non-gaming uses of a PC, console gaming families are apparently happy with just taking turns on the family PC, possibly adding a tablet or low-end laptop to the mix.
Had a friend that wanted to get into PC gaming but money was tight, found him a nice C2Q system [on a classified ad website] with 19 LCD and KM for just $130
I know some people who are afraid of buying thi
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Realistically, even a bare-minimum gaming PC (with Windows & video card) is going to be $500-$600, and more like $700-$800 for something that can play the big games out now at 1080p. Of course many gamers here will spend $1000+. In addition, that requires you to spend the time/deal with the bother of building your own gaming PC - sure, for some people it's kind of fun, for other people they don't enjoy it, and time is money. And then what you set up is going to be a big noisy box that may work great
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I don't know about this. Call of Duty Ghosts is currently $30 for PC, $30 for XBox, $36 for XBone. New releases are all $60, right? Savings don't sound like much.
I don't own an XBOne, I just think gaming PCs are inherently pretty expensive. Your example of $379 for a super cheap gaming PC doesn't include the $100+tax cost of windows, so that's pretty much in line with the $500-$600 I was talking about.
Looking at the survey [steampowered.com], it seems 1080p is much more popular than 1600x900. Obviously going higher is b
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Yes, but remember, the PC gaming market has already shown a willingness to pay more than twice the cost of a next-gen console for a really kick-ass gaming experience.
The key to Valve's success with its Steam Box, IMO, is to keep in mind that PC gamers are a very different market than console gamers. And, they have more money to spend. If they try to position Steam Box as nothing more than a direct competitor to consoles, they will f
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I'm already putting together a Steam Box that's going to end up costing about 4 times what a next-gen console goes for.
But why? If you can get a near equivalent experience for 1/4 the price, why waste money on hardware when you can get more games. Then again... that Steam box actually won't have many games.
And don't tell me that games looking "slightly better" is worth a 4X price premium.
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There's a whole video about it from steam dev days. You can look it up on youtube.
Basically the touchscreen meant looking away from the screen, refocusing on the controller, which pulled you out of the game.
What they played with instead is: You have two touchpads and most games steam games have integration with the steam overlay. They've been experimenting with having one of the back buttons pull up a screen actually on screen (I mean, what you would've had on the touchscreen, be it extra buttons, controlle
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OEMs can not afford to sell steam machines at a loss. Unless Valve cuts them some margin for steam sales to their devices, but imagine all the early adopters buying the cheap pcs and formatting them (so there would be no way for Valve to know that any steam sale was made from a dell steam machine).
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but imagine all the early adopters buying the cheap pcs and formatting them
Why would early adopters need to format a Steam Machine? They can just exit Steam, start GNOME, and run their non-Steam GNU/Linux applications that way.
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Well yeah, that further reinforces my point. OEMs can not afford to sell at a loss (or very low profit margin) and expect to get their money back from game sales.
Desktop PC margins (Score:2)
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They said their reasoning was that a screen on the controller forced you to split your attention between the TV screen and the controller screen. The screen on the controller would only end up being useful when you weren't playing a game, and the cost wasn't worth it for being used strictly for non-gaming.
So basically cost wasn't the major factor.
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Plus, Valve is now using "Ghost Mode".
They now show what you are touching on top of the game while you are touching it.
Details are in the Steam Controller talk during the Steam Dev Days; starting 23:35 [youtube.com].
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Well, ghost mode would now be gone since the touchscreen is gone too.
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their reasoning was that a screen on the controller forced you to split your attention between the TV screen and the controller screen
Yep... glad to see someone is learning from the Wii U's mistakes.
DS (Score:2)
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Now compare that to the perceived distances between your TV and your controller. Or do you hold your controllers with your arms outstretched parallel to the ground?
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The DS/3DS treat the two separate screens more like one larger screen. Heck, in the 2DS, they literally are one LCD panel with a bezel stuck on top in the middle. There's a big difference between looking up and down on a tall screen versus shifting your focus from a screen 10 feet away and a screen a foot or two away.
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What costs? Don't be fooled by the high price of the Wii U controller. Touch screens, especially small touch screens are very cheap. They scale in cost depending on the size of the screen. A touch digitiser for a typical mobile phone costs less than $10 in small quantities, so for something the size of what they were proposing you could estimate maybe $2-3 in bulk. The screens themselves aren't much more expensive either unless you're aiming for IPS retina or OLED or some other wanky screen from a high-end
Higher bandwidth radio (Score:2)
OLD NEWS (Score:5, Informative)
This was announced January 15th at Steam Dev Days. It was all over the news.
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Clearly you must be new here.
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Here is the presentation in which it was announced, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfN5WK7OzU8 [youtube.com]
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Not sure why that wasn't a feature last generation for consoles. I suppose they thought it would decrease the sales for controllers, but I can't imagine that holding true for steam boxes.
We know, sfcrazy already submitted that 2mos ago (Score:5, Interesting)
http://slashdot.org/submission... [slashdot.org]
It's just that yesterday (or the day before) they actually unveiled some new imagery showing what it looks like.
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Is it me or does it look like someone took an XBox One controller and stuck all the buttons underneath rather than on top? I know it doesn't have thumbsticks but the grips and buttons look identical to those of the Xbox One controller and the Steam button is a blatant rip off of the Xbox One button.
Given that this, the Wii U Pro controllers, the PS4 controller, and the Xbox One controller are all blatant rip offs of the XBox 360 controller is there some un-admitted acceptance that the Xbox 360 controller wa
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I don't like the idea of a touch screen on the controller but I have yet to see a game take advantage of it properly. So far implementations of the Wii U touch screen have been a major pain to use and serve no real purpose in a game. Even the best example I can think of from the Mario game requires a person to pause, change what they are looking at, and then let go of the controller to press the touch panel.
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Have you played Lego City Undercover or Pikmin 3? They both make good use of it.
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No though pikmin 3 is on my to-buy list
Well (Score:1)
They probably saw the Wii U and realised the most expensive mistake on it.
Can't say it'll affect my opinion of their product one way or another.
There are some local multiplayer PC games (Score:2)
Eh, that doesn't really fit many games on Steam though. Local multiplayer is a rare thing on PC games. Damn shame.
I've been collecting links to Slashdot comments that recommend local multiplayer PC games [pineight.com]. Mostly the problem has been that very few people are willing to either A. carry a desktop PC back and forth between the desk and the living room or B. buy and maintain a second computer that lacks consoles' advantage in ease of use.
Good for them (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Good for them (Score:4, Insightful)
"No gaming control pad should have a touchscreen. It was absolutely ridiculous on the Wii U"
I strongly disagree. Used properly, the touchpad and second display can be a great addition. Just look at some of the DS or 3DS games for how it should be done. In fact, if Nintendo would release a WiiU addon that would allow me to use my 3DS cartridges on it, I'd buy it in a heartbeat and airmail them a thank you cake.
They're all X (Score:2)
But which of the four is the X button [pineight.com]?
If you refer to the fact that A and B are swapped and X and Y are swapped between the Super NES and the Xbox, the Xbox was not the first. Xbox inherited this layout ultimately from the Sega Genesis, which predates the Super NES.
D pad (Score:2)
Why the seperate up down left right buttons? Put a decent D pad on there. The seperate buttons instead of a good D pad is why I hate the all Sony controllers. Xbox can't make a decent D pad. Can anyone make a decent D pad anymore.
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True, I have one of those controllers. Problem is it isn't that great either.
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They improved it again with the Xbox One, have you tried that?
It's a design around (Score:2)
The seperate buttons instead of a good D pad is why I hate the all Sony controllers.
I don't have a PS3 or PS4, but the directional pad on at least PlayStation, Dual Shock, and Dual Shock 2 controllers is all one piece of plastic. It has four separate raised segments to avoid Nintendo patents on the cross shape. And in practice, with the thumb lying flat across a PlayStation directional pad, the feel of rolling the thumb from one direction to the next isn't that different from Nintendo's design.
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In practice left - right or up- down is still horrible. You will tear your thumb up on the separating plastic playing a fighting game with any of those type of combo's.
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There are these things on the Dual Shock called Analog Sticks, perhaps you should be using them. And if the game is one of those fighting games stuck in 1993 paradigms because the Fighting Game Fanboys insist on it (Street Fighter), perhaps you should play a modern fighting game that uses proper controls.
Or if you must, plug in an arcade stick.
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Because the controller by design does not need a dpad. It only needs extra buttons in case you run out of practical mapping.
You have a left analog zone and haptic feedback on it. And a right analog zone with haptic feedback. Each zone notices the difference between push down and just swiping on the surface. Each zone also has 3 parts, where you can do stuff like map things to the outer and inner edges.
So for a lot of 3D games, you would do something like
-Left analog is left zone. Outer edge is used as dpad(
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you ever try to play MW or GTA with the left handed setups?
You don't have to be left-handed to hate GTA keybindings. They suck pretty hard for right-handed, too.
It's probably like one man-week tops to include a button remapper in-game. There's no excuse why every title doesn't have one, doubly so for a title financed so well. Thank goodness unreal engine games tend to follow the example set by UT.
It annoys me, personally, because apparently 90% of gamers cannot keep from pushing R3/L3 when using the stick so they put the jump out on the button pads where you hav
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It's probably like one man-week tops to include a button remapper in-game. There's no excuse why every title doesn't have one
Multiplayer is one reason. People don't want to have to wait for the other players in the room to reconfigure their bindings every time.
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I have to do this on the second (buffing) character when running two characters under the same userid in borderlands split screen, because it only takes one set of settings per userid. It takes like 30 seconds, tops. Of course that's partially because the default mapping is somewhat close to reasonable.
Analog Face Buttons? (Score:2)
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It wasn't impossible, I could tell how hard.....on a controller that wasn't too old. I was able to use the feature in a couple of games. Didn't work so well in Gran Turismo though. I can also bullseye womp-rats.
I have an idea (Score:1)
jordan store http://www.shoesctv.com (Score:1)