Following on from the success of the Steam Deck, Valve is creating its very own ecosystem of products. The Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all set to launch in the new year. We’ve tried each of them and here’s what you need to know about each one.
“From the Frame to the Controller to the Machine, we’re a fairly small industrial design team here, and we really made sure it felt like a family of devices, even to the slightest detail,” Clement Gallois, a designer at Valve, tells me during a recent visit to Valve HQ. “How it feels, the buttons, how they react… everything belongs and works together kind of seamlessly.”
For more detail, make sure to check out our in-depth stories linked below:
Steam Frame: Valve’s new wireless VR headset
Steam Machine: Compact living room gaming box
Steam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse
Valve’s official video announcement.
So uh, ahem.
Yes.
Valve can indeed count to three.
A lot of the problems you mention with Steam Deck can be addressed by taking the time to set up like a uh, a universal control scheme set up.
Start with the default ‘desktop mode’ layout template, tweak it around to work as you like.
Like uh, I’ve got the left pad as mouse movement, and then either middle mouse or a desktop zoom bind for left pad click.
Right pad I made a dpad, broke into up/left as left click, down/right as right click… i made a bunch of common ctrl + whatever commands happen on the abxy buttons, when im holding the ctrl bumper…
Reworked the abxy buttons to do like, enter, escape, space, backspace/delete, when not being affected by ctrl bumper… maybe have em trigger a turbo after being double clicked or held for so long, to be able to like, backspace a bunch quickly without a million taps…
Either double bind the dpad to controller up dn lft rgt, and the keyboard up dn lf rt, or via a button chord or mode shift… maybe also enable a turbo by some rules, so you can move along a typed string, or navigate some UI…
Moved keyboard up to the hamburger menu, the sort of PiP button is now either alt or tab…
Made touch right stick + bumpers scroll up/down, touch left stick + bumpers volume up/down…
And have some kind of bind remaining to be able to alt+tab, win/super, maybe ` for console access, maybe a kill current window, pc key combo bind for if something locks up or blows up gamescope…
Anyway, do something like that, save it as a template, maybe give it some alt layouts for a pure controller typed scheme, but throw in the ability to pullup the keyboard and also use the mouse, for situstions where a typing prompt of pc type UI appears, have those layouts switch able via back face buttons…
Now you’ve got a multi tool template, assign that to whatever weird thing you’re trying to launch, then modify it from there for that specific game/program, that way everything is always at least close to whatever your universal template is, and you wont lose your mind with 48493 totally different control schemes.