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Valve's Steam Machines Delayed, Won't Be Coming In 2014
sfcrazy (1542989) writes "Valve has announced that its Steam Machines won't be available in the market anytime in 2014. The company delayed the release due to ongoing work on the Steam Controller. Valve's Eric Hope explains on Steam Forums why the work on controller is causing the delay: 'We're now using wireless prototype controllers to conduct live playtests, with everyone from industry professionals to die-hard gamers to casual gamers. It's generating a ton of useful feedback, and it means we'll be able to make the controller a lot better. Of course, it's also keeping us pretty busy making all those improvements. Realistically, we're now looking at a release window of 2015, not 2014.'"
You don't want to ship early then fix when you're talking about the controller. You want that to be a steady target for developers, not just for big changes like whether you need analogue triggers, but for subtle qualitative ones like the throw of the triggers and buttons, and in this case pretty much everything about the repsonse of those touchpads. How much contact is needed to register a touch? What method do you use to smooth the capacitance data into coordinates? What's the sample rate? Developers will spend lots of time tuning the "feel" of their games to match those parameters, and if you change those a year later, suddenly their game is going to feel subtly wrong, (Anyone who has had to play a console game with a cheap thirdparty pad knows this pain.) The developer will have to live with it or go in and issue some sort of controller-version-specific patch.
Nope, with controllers, doing it right and late is more important than doing it almost right and early.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
given that after 7 years they have yet to release a conclusion to the cliffhanger ending of Ep. 2 for one of the biggest games ever developed is it any surprise that they won't be releasing SteamBox on time? I've long since stopped caring about Ep. 3 and I won't hold my breath for SteamBox. Even if it is released, will Valve ensure a steady supply of content for it?
It seems the effort is losing Steam.