The steam controller has 4 different “HD” vibration motors, I’m assuming a phone has a single motor. So while it is possible to move a device this way, it wouldn’t work as well or be very controllable on a phone.

You actually need 4, two to race each other, and two to control them.

You have to love all the enthusiasts coming together to find the best ways to not play games with their controllers.

The current Deck pricing is probably out of their hands, memory prices are crazy. It’s not just Valve, the Lenovo legion go handhelds went up by about $400 for the 16GB models and $600-700 for the 32GB models. The Asus ROG/Xbox handhelds haven’t increased in price yet, but I suspect that probably means they either overestimated demand or were able to negotiate a fixed price contract before prices got crazy. Either way they’ll probably shoot up soon as well.

The controller has less reason to be expensive, although it does have several premium features beyond your normal controller. They priced it between something like an standard xbox controller ($65) and an xbox elite controller ($150-200), so in that context it doesn’t seem that bad.

Do you really think a website that was created to cover the steam deck, shouldn’t also cover steam machine/controller/frame? It’s already pretty niche, and I think most people interested in the Deck will also be interested in other steam hardware.

I’m pretty sure it does

My issue was that by default it wasn’t sensitive enough, requiring a much longer time and lots of lifted thumb time to move the cursor across the screen, especially across multiple monitors. But when I turned the sensitive up a lot, I started having trouble having the precision needed to click small buttons. A nicer trackball might have enough weight and smooth enough action to “fling” it, which I could see working, but the one I had didn’t work for that.

The deck trackpads have a larger contact surface that the thumb ball I used, and have pretty predictable “fling” ability which helps them move large distances easily while still being reasonably precise.

The fingerball I used was much larger, and I found it easier to have a suitably high sensitivity while still being accurate enough. Although over several months of use I never quite got to the same ease of use as my preferred mouse setup, and the actual shape of the fingerball body was too flat which was ironically unergonomic for extended use.

In the end I went back to using a mouse. I did realize that I kinda use my mouse like a big trackball though, I keep the base of my palm in a fixed location on the desk, and do the majority of moving the mouse by moving it around with my fingers. The sensitivity is pretty high, but using it this way gives me pretty precise control without any ergonomic issues.

I have actually, I tried using a thumb ball for awhile before swapping to a 52mm fingerball.

Felt like the ball was too small and my thumb lacked the precision to make it a good alternative to a regular mouse. Your mouse looks to have a larger thumb ball than the one I was using, which would help but wouldn’t be enough (I think). To be honest, I prefer the deck trackpads to that thumb ball mouse I was using.

Good to know!

That works, but my preferred setup for controller shooters is gyro+flickstick. I don’t think the trackpad would be as good for flickstick.

For FPS games, I’d rank it Mouse>Finger Trackball>Gyro Aim>Thumb Trackball/Trackpads>>Thumbstick

So yeah, if mouse+kb is available, use that. But that’s not a good option on my living room couch.

I started to add sc-controller, but stopped when I saw the last commit was 3 years ago, well before the new steam controller.

Not surprised there’s a vibe coded fork.

It’s a really good controller, if you want trackpads/backbuttons/gyro/etc it’s hard to beat. That said, it is just a controller. If you don’t need those features you can definitely find other options.

Without steam it defaults to doing a combination of keyboard and mouse inputs, meant to let people use a desktop. Idea is you could boot up computer, and then be able to navigate the computer to launch steam/etc.

You do have options for playing games from outside of steam:

• add games as a non-steam game to steam, allows managing inputs/etc.
• any games that use SDL will have native steam controller support (many emulators etc)
• software like Steamless controller (windows) or SISR (windows or linux) allow you to use the controller outside of steam, allowing different levels of input customization.

edit: removed sc-controller because it’s apparently not updated for the new steam controller yet

Trackpads are crucial if you want to play strategy games or anything mouse based. They also offer a lot better aiming control in fps games (although I think using gyro for aiming is even better than that). They also can be used for fancy touch menus and things like that.

The back buttons are also extremely nice.

Probably that they’re actively testing in on Deck through Proton, fixing related issues, and adjusting performance to make sure it’s a good experience.

New CEO can’t stop Xbox from killing any studio within reach.

There’s speculation that Arkane will be shuttered soon as well

Pretty scary, my desktop had the libgdata package left over as an orphan from something I had installed in the past. Thankfully I hadn’t updated on the day of the attack, my package logs show my build of libgdata was from a February update instead.

People using the aur on steamOS probably are doing so through distrobox. Distrobox doesn’t sandbox as far as I know, so the infostealer part of the malware would still be a risk. The rootkit part I’m guessing would fail, since I think distrobox on Deck usually runs in rootless mode.

It also seems like there was a fairly short window of time before the infected packages were caught, anyone who didn’t update one of the compromised packages on that exact day should be fine.

Especially with this, I would fully expect the game to be playable on Deck.

That said, I’ve seen devs preview their game on Steam Deck before, and then have anticheat that won’t actually allow it to run on SteamOS