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.
The controller is a day 1 buy, if the price is right maybe the cube. 16GB RAM 8 VRAM seems a bit low though.
Yeah, I’m genuinely excited about the new controller. My biggest complaint about the Steam Deck has been the lack of touch-enabled controllers for mouse control. Because even in Big Picture mode, there are still some games that occasionally need to use the mouse. Launchers, random in-game menus, emulator menus, etc… I have the original Steam Controller, and use it occasionally, but it has a few big flaws… Notably, the lack of arrow keys, which makes playing certain console games (or emulators) on it difficult.
The PS5 controller at least has a touch pad, but there’s no easy way to scale the mouse sensitivity for the controller’s touchpad, and the default sensitivity is way too high. Barely touching the pad has the mouse cursor zipping across the screen. Hitting tiny options on a “1080p launcher on a 4k TV” drop-down menu is nearly impossible. There’s also the issue where you need to hold the PlayStation button to enable mouse mode, but holding the button for ~15 seconds turns off the controller. It’s a laughably dumb oversight, where you have to do all of your (completely unscaled, way too sensitive) mouse movement in ~10 second increments, or else you’ll accidentally turn your controller off.
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.
Yeah I’m holding judgement till pricing too, but… cautiously optimistic this thing could be comparable to a 1440p crushing, soldered on chip , small form factor pc, for maybe roughly the same price as doing a minisforum based sff build.
I am guessing that yeah, the Machine will be capablr of 4K60 the way a PS5 is (aka, its not, it does 2K and then checkerboards it), but, if you target roughly that level of hardware at 1440p, take advantage of a semi custom chip achitecture…
Could be good, no real way to know without testing.
But hey, Science is Fun!
4K 60 with FSR. Of course they don’t mention what level of FSR.
Should be perfect for 1080p gaming
deleted by creator
Yeah I’m trying to find real hands on reviews especially on 4k TVs without variable refresh. RDNA 3 doesn’t leave me hopeful on games like Indiana Jones. Who knows, maybe eGPUs will be supported
Not likely as it’s supposed to be an all in one solution
There might be a single USB4 but everything routes through the CPU IO and there is no chipset.
Definitely not going to be anything more than performance/quality FSR or native 1080p
Good enough for my needs. I’ll start saving right away.