92 - The Steam Controller

[matt]

In this video, I talk about the Steam controller and offer some size comparisons. If you wanted to see how the Steam controller compares to an Atari Lynx, now you can!

[gagaplex]

I'm very, VERY skeptical about SteamOS because I see no purpose to it, really. But their controller looks interesting, even though it may be requiring one to really change the way one is used to play with controllers. I can never get quite used to the touchpads on my notebooks and I tend to prefer touch-screen-like technology with a stylus (like the Nintendo DS, works surprisingly well for FPS!), but I suppose it could be quite good once one has gotten used to it.

[matt]

I have yet to get used to it after maybe 10 or so hours of playtime... Hopefully things will improve once more games use the native API and as they refine the hardware.

[ranger_lennier]

I'm very, VERY skeptical about SteamOS because I see no purpose to it, really.

Well, the most obvious benefit for Steam Boxes is that it will make them significantly cheaper because the sellers won't have to pay Microsoft for a Windows license. It's possible they'll manage to optimize the OS for games better, so that gamers can get better performance than they could on the same hardware running Windows. But I don't think they've proven they can do this yet.

[ranger_lennier]

I have yet to get used to it after maybe 10 or so hours of playtime... Hopefully things will improve once more games use the native API and as they refine the hardware.

I would really like for the controller to work well. There are plenty of games designed around a keyboard and mouse, but just from an ergonomic perspective I much prefer a gamepad. So if they can replicate that performance it would be great. But I definitely can't look at it and understand how it works. Maybe if I try out the haptic feedback then I'll get what they're talking about.

[matt]

It is definitely possible to optimize an OS for gaming. However, the bigger overhead is drivers, and OpenGL is tough to write a driver for because it doesn't map well to the hardware, and there are SOOO many way of doing everything. Valve likes to tout that they got better performance with Left 4 Dead on linux, but they gloss over the fact that they worked with the graphics card vendors to optimize the drivers for their particular games. Potentially they could do something similar for the Direct3D drivers, but that would lessen the impact of their article.

Perhaps Steam Machines and Valves OpenGL push will be the instrument of change, but I doubt that most games will run better in OpenGL - especially triple A games that spend a lot of time optimizing their DX11.1 implementation to run on Xbox One.

I would really like the controller to work. I don't think it works that well at the moment though. Hopefully they'll improve it. I wrote a big long post on the Steam Universe group about how to improve it, but I'm not sure if they care what I think. ahhaha

To me, the haptic thing really isn't as great as they make it out to be. I couldn't figure out what to do with it for Neverending Nightmares, so right now, it does nothing. haha