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Steam Controller Hands-on
Ars Technica has posted their impressions from a hands-on session with Valve's new Steam Controller. The controller notably departs from standard practice of relying on two thumbsticks for precise movement, instead replacing them with concave touchpads. From the article:
"When used as a kind of virtual trackball, as most games did with the right pad, it was a revelation. When used as a virtual d-pad, as it was on the left pad, it was an exercise in frustration. Let's focus on the right pad first. There's definitely a learning curve to using this side of the pad properly; years of muscle memory had me trying to use it like an analog stick (minus the stick) at first. It only really began to click when I started swiping my thumb over the pad, as I've seen in previous videos (there was no one on hand to really explain the controller to me, so I was left figuring it out on my own, just like a new Steam Machine owner). When I say it "started to click," I mean that literally. The subtle clicking in your hands as you swipe along the pad is an incredible tactile experience, as if there was an actual weighted ball inside the controller that's rolling in the direction you swipe. And like a trackball slowly losing its inertia, the clicking slows its pace after you lift your thumb off the pad, giving important contextual information for the momentum imparted by your swipe."
More write-ups are available about the controller from Gamespot, Gizmodo, and Joystiq.
Oh steam, you make me piss the most frothy piss I have ever pissed!
Well, it's not like you're being steamrolled into accepting this as an input device. With an open platform, you should be free to use whatever input device you want.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
The controller is over-engineered and silly, and apparently the SteamBox consoles themselves are going to sell for $500. That's insane. This thing isn't in the same league as an Xbox One or PS4. There are barely any games for it, and barely any announced!
This is going to be another footnote in the history of consoles, unless Valve is planning a big surprise reveal of MASSIVE developer support. Which I doubt will happen.
Like your COCK? Can I use your COCK like a joy stick?
Methinks your bridge has structural deficiencies.
An adapter to use the PS3 Six-Axis controller in 3 ... 2 ....
A solid 20 mins at the press event. I'm a big Valve fanboy, but this just didn't work for me. It didn't feel like a good gamepad replacement, nor a good keyboard/mouse replacement. Tries to replace both, masters neither.
A spatial controller could be cool, like the Gyration Air Mouse, but I [w]ould bet Gor[i]lla arm fat[i]gue would be a problem...
Consider how Nintendo solved the problem of arm fatigue. The Wii Remote can be used with one end balanced on your chair or in your lap. As long as the camera in the controller can see the IR emitters next to your TV, the Wii Remote can detect which way it is pointed.
And how many 3rd party titles were out before the launch of other consoles?
I don't have time to go into exact figures, but Wii was backward compatible with GameCube games that didn't use the network adapter. Wii U was backward compatible with all Wii games. Game Boy Color could play Game Boy games, Game Boy Advance could play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, DS could play Game Boy Advance games, and 3DS could play DS games. PlayStation 2 and 3 could play games for the original PlayStation, and early PlayStation 3 consoles could play PlayStation 2 games. Adapters were available to play Master System games on Genesis and Game Gear, Game Boy games on Super NES, and most Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games on GameCube.
And SteamOS is backward compatible with a small set of Steam (for PC) games.
Most [indie Steam] games are also quite cheap, especially compared to the 50-60$ price fixing lock-in enforced by the Big Three console manufacturers
What price fixing? I downloaded a few WiiWare games on Wii Shop, and they were around $10 each.
Mostly short indie games
What makes "short" games necessarily inferior, especially at low prices? Even classics like Super Mario Bros. can be completed in six minutes. It's so short that people can run it and re-run it to improve their time for competition.
all available on better platforms.
What makes one platform "better" than another in your opinion? Does a gaming platform need a walled garden with restrictive developer qualifications, put in place ostensibly to improve median game quality on reasoning dating back to the 1983 crash, in order to be a "better" platform?
I thought an Xbox 360 controller needed an adapter to turn the controller's proprietary RF signals into USB signals, namely a PC Wireless Gaming Receiver.
Steam is a DRM-based platform, I cannot imagine any scenario where it resembles "open".
For one thing, the Steam DRM platform is designed to coexist with DRM-free games on the same machine. I could take a DRM-free game for Linux and install it on an Ubuntu PC that also has the Steam client installed or on a SteamOS PC. Console DRM, on the other hand, is specifically designed to reject anything DRM-free. For another, it's reportedly easier to get an indie game greenlit on Steam than it was on the seventh-generation consoles. Remember the issues that Robert Pelloni had with his RPG Bob's Game?
You should be able to plug your Linux box into a TV using an HDMI port today.
Provided you already have a Linux box with a gaming GPU and a TV-friendly slim chassis, and you already have another computer to use at your desk. A lot of families currently own one PC, and it's in a separate room from the big TV in the living room. True, a SteamOS PC is just a mass-produced set-top gaming PC, but the fact that it's marketed as a set-top gaming PC means it's more likely to come with an appropriate GPU and chassis than your average Office Depot special.
Few people are going to want a SteamBox because it is Linux, they will want it for the "Steam DRM Service" otherwise they would just use Linux.
Unless you want to run both commercial games that use Steam and games that aren't (yet) greenlit on Steam without having to buy two machines. Before this push to get Steam on the television, one had to buy two devices to connect to the TV: a PC for the indie games and a console for the major-label games.
And I can plug my Windows box into my TV today using HDMI
Again, provided it's in the same room as your TV. See, for example, adolf's comment.
from my perspective you seem exciting about plugging a Linux box into a TV
We're excited about manufacturers bucking long-standing tradition and widespread mental sets and actually mass-producing and marketing a Linux gaming box designed for the TV to the general public at a price comparable to current-generation consoles.
It's my understanding that relatively few wired first-party Xbox 360 controllers were produced, mostly for the "core system" package. Nowadays, pretty much all first-party Xbox 360 controllers sold in stores are wireless. If you are switching from an Xbox 360 to a gaming PC, you probably already own mostly or all wireless controllers, and you'll need the receiver to use them with your PC.
Steam OS can run a huge swath of emulation too. From MAME to 2600 to Dreamcast and more.
So how do you read the Dreamcast discs, Atari 2600 cartridges, or arcade PCBs on your PC so that you can create ROM images useful in emulators? I know about Retrode, but that's for Super NES and Sega Genesis games, and it seems perpetually sold out.
If Steam were just a service where I could just buy games, I'd be all over it. Unfortunately, what Steam mostly is is DRM. It's obstructionware that insists on being present. I don't like having to wait for it to load, having to wait for it to retry and fail to find a network connection, and having to check "Offline" every single time I run something. I don't like it blowing my mods away, forcing me to do updates, and randomly unsorting and resetting my list of Skyrim mods if I don't save my edits fast enough. Steam DRM kills the Steambox for me, which is very sad because the Steambox is a Windows 8-killing PC in spite of Valve's efforts to try to steer perception away from that.
...AMD GPUs, apparently. I haven't tried it yet, but I've been waiting to get it set up on a gaming rig I built for our living room.
Wake me when it's anywhere near as fast or precise as a good gaming mouse.
Until then, the console controllers are a joke for serious gaming. Fine for casual gaming though.
Short indie games are short by design.
True. Compare to fiction: not every novel has to be Rand's Atlas Shrugged or Tolstoy's War and Peace or even Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes there's only time for a novella like Wells's The Time Machine or Malhotra's I Moved Your Cheese. And in the same way that one can pick up a short story anthology for the price of a novel, one can pick up a pile of indie games for the same price as a 50-60 USD AAA game.
Really? Because in 30 seconds I found 5 places selling it. Amazon can have one to my house by Thursday or i can drive to Frys 15 miles away and have it tomorrow.
Good-bye
attaching some additional pieces of hardware like some rubber, plastic pad, spring ,small stick to make it behave like real joystick? I remember that there were some hobby projects to make something attached to MSX numpad to make it work like joystick long long ago.
I don't see the big deal about running HDMI cables unless they are very long. I have no hassles with ten metres and really can't see any prospect of any unless there are a lot of machine tools or other sources of a lot of intense electromagnetic noise around. Washing machine motors etc shouldn't put out enough to be a hassle even if you loop the cable around it.
Really? Because in 30 seconds I found 5 places selling it. Amazon can have one to my house by Thursday or i can drive to Frys 15 miles away and have it tomorrow.
Most people don't live near the supermarket of electronics. And you can't actually be sure that Fry's will have anything in stock that they claim they have, if you've been there more than once you should know that by now. Sure you can order one, you can order anything.
It's still true that first-party wired controllers are relatively rare on the 360. You rarely see them at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's still true that first-party wired controllers are relatively rare on the 360. You rarely see them at all.
Uhh, no, you're just wrong. They are being sold everywhere. Not only at Fry's, but at Best Buy, Walmart and Gamestop too, if you're stuck in the past and need a physical store for some bizarre reason.
Of course most people shop online these days. Amazon certainly has them.
Uhh, no, you're just wrong. They are being sold everywhere. Not only at Fry's, but at Best Buy, Walmart and Gamestop too, if you're stuck in the past and need a physical store for some bizarre reason.
I can only speak to the walmart and gamestop nearest me, and they don't stock new wired controllers and the gamestop seldom has a used one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Best Buy, Walmart, and GameStop stores near me had wired controllers when I checked a month and a half ago, but they were all third-party. All first-party controllers I could find were wireless. And even if wired first-party controllers were more widely available, that doesn't help someone who already owns several wireless controllers.
An individual who runs pirated ROMs on a gaming PC is unlikely to get in trouble. A company that makes and sells gaming PCs and markets them on their ability to run pirated ROMs is far more likely to get in trouble for inducing copyright infringement. MGM v. Grokster.
I don't see the big deal about running HDMI cables unless they are very long.
From one room to another, they would be very long, and not everybody has both permission and inclination to cut holes in the wall to run the cable. The advantage of a console or set-top PC is that you don't have to negotiate with your landlord for permission to break the walls, and you don't have to pay an electrician to pull the cable through the wall if local laws require it, and you don't have to also pull USB, which requires a repeater every 5 m, for the game controllers, and someone else can be using the PC for surfing the web while you're gaming.
True, a PC maker could bundle something like Midway Arcade Treasures or Namco Museum with new PCs. But there are a lot of old games whose copyright ownership has become untraceable over the decades. And even for games whose copyright owner is still in business, there are still a lot of copyright owners who either are entirely unwilling to license or insist on unreasonable royalties, as Hairyfeet discovered when he tried to do much as you suggest.
Fair enough in a lot of cases but I just don't buy the argument about electrical interference.
Laws that require hiring a bonded electrician to install HDMI, USB, or Ethernet likely exist as a safety (or safety theater) measure arising from the 115 or 220 volt (depending on region) AC lines in the walls.
The main reason I don't have a PC near the TV is if it has to have the grunt to play new 3D games (or even h264 when it came out) then it has to be relatively expensive and have plenty of cooling.
Manufacturers of SteamOS PCs claim to have solved the cost and cooling problems. This preview of iBuyPower's Steam Machine guesses a price on par with that of the Xbox One.
I really hope that Valve/Steam puts more pressure on publishers to just ditch their DRM options.
PCs that ship with SteamOS are probably pressure enough, as a lot of these third-party digital restrictions management libraries aren't ported to the Debian GNU/Linux operating system that underlies SteamOS. As far as I can tell, the only StarForce I can get on Linux is an early NES shoot-em-up by Tecmo, dumped from the Game Pak with the INL Retro copier.
However, I don't see this being possible w/o Steam being a monopoly.
Once the iBuyPower Steam Machine comes out, SteamOS will have a (temporary?) monopoly on mass-produced set-top gaming PCs.
Are you actually being serious or is that some hysterical "the other tribe is creating a nanny state" bullshit?
I lack the time to search through current city codes worldwide, but this answer to a question on Server Fault and this forum post and these comments to a Lifehacker article claim that at least one Australian state requires that even licensed electricians need or needed a separate data cabling licence.
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The people commenting on that article have got it mixed up with electrical cabling even though they pretend that they have not. My nephew has just started an apprenticeship as an electrician and he can run ethernet cable unsupervised. The voltage and current is far too low for the electrical safety standards to apply at all.
There is of course a training course for cabling but it's not a requirement. It's just a convenience for employers that don't want a fully fledged electrician but want someone with a clue about cabling. I can, and have legally run cable through commercial office buildings but it's usually more convenient to get electricians to do it since they have the ladders and are good at it.
Lots of people are too lazy to setup an HTPC.
This is exactly the problem that PCs that ship with SteamOS are intended to fix, by providing a home theater PC in a box.
Lots of people actually like Apple's walled garden
Why? Is it a perception that restrictive developer qualifications are correlated with higher median quality of applications, or is it something else?
or accept that Windows (8) PC as that's the only thing the big name store carries.
That and their pragmatist friends and relatives have told them that Windows 8 can be tamed. Windows Vista too had become acceptable after Mojave (Windows Vista Service Pack 1) shipped.
and when they say "I want to play games in the living room, the LCD response is PS4/XBONE or even the Wii U
So what is the response to "I want to play game X with mod Y in the living room"? For example, third parties have made mods to Oblivion and Skyrim that make the experience much more enjoyable than vanilla versions by nerfing certain annoying mechanics. But the console versions tend not to allow mods to nearly the same extent as PC versions. The only recent console game I'm aware of with thorough mods has been Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and that's because security on the original Wii was cracked so quickly.
Linux/SteamOS will be a more viable option alongside the other platforms, hopefully at least more viable than... the Mac (oh god the pessimist in me is now even more skeptical)
I was under the impression that a port to Linux would make a port to OS X more viable because both Linux and OS X use OpenGL graphics.
[Most gamers don't see lack of selection and lack of mods on Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony platforms as] a serious enough problem to be fixed by upgrading/switching
New games not coming out for PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 anymore is another problem. Should a gamer solve that by upgrading to PlayStation 4, by upgrading to Xbox One, or by upgrading to a Steam Machine? The Steam Machine would solve not only lack of new games for the old platform but also lack of selection and lack of mods.
And this is where "games and Office" tips in the favor of Windows.
LibreOffice is available for Windows and Linux. If you meant specifically Microsoft Office, that costs hundreds of USD extra anyway. And if you're going to be naming names, you could make the same argument about iWork or Final Cut: a PC isn't good enough, and you have to buy a Mac. And once you've bought a Mac mini, you already have something that can run Steam games for Mac and can be connected to a TV.
I suspect many parents will be skeptical of the Steam machine as a living room console (I'm switching context to consoles now) as (AFAIK) there are no discs.
How does Apple's iPad get away with not having discs? How do a lot of laptops? Do most people still prefer to buy a USB DVD burner for a PC and use it to rip CDs in iTunes? I know there still exist 70-year-old grandmas who prefer to use mix CDs as the physical embodiment of a playlist because it's something they can hold in their hands. But you can't even do that for books, video, or apps.
there are people (so many that MS relented) who just wants to walk in a store
Getting to the store depends on whether your city cleans up the road after a major snowstorm faster than your Internet provider restores service after the same snowstorm. I, for one, didn't lose power or Internet during the recent storm, but a snow emergency was declared in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And if you do end up losing power, you're screwed either way. But I'll grant that disc-based consoles are better for rural gamers, who usually can't get cable or fiber Internet.
Well, in my definition of gamer, a gamer should upgrade to as many systems he can afford that has the games he wants to play. And keep his old ones around if they still work, removing them only after emulation/backwards compatibility is available
How many daisy-chained composite and HDMI switch boxes would it take to keep a PlayStation 2, GameCube, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and Wii U running, as well as an NES, Genesis, Super NES, and Nintendo 64 for games not on Virtual Console?
This means, a person sticking to a PS4/XBONE can get his Sony or MS exclusives, but not miss out on "SteamBox exclusives", as that's not a thing.
There are plenty of games that are exclusive to Steam, such as games from a developer that is not yet licensed for PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. Is it easier to get a game greenlit on Steam or on the consoles? (This ties into your comment about using Steam to gain experience.) Besides, like other X11/Linux PCs, SteamOS PCs run non-Steam games made for X11/Linux, such as the X11/Linux version of a PC game that uses multiple gamepads from a not-yet-console-licensed developer.
The value added from mods is extra, on top of the value that the original game has.
Tell that to anyone who bought Half-Life just for Counter-Strike or a Source game for Garry's Mod. Or are you claiming that this demographic is financially insignificant?
How does Apple's iPad get away with not having discs? How do a lot of laptops?
They aren't sold to be used in the living room with a big screen?
I'll consider that once you explain what screen size has to do with software distribution media. Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, and video on demand from the cable company doesn't use discs yet play on a TV.