Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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Yeah, I don't know why they'd use that image. It's so lazy and uncreative. That's not what it'll look like. They literally just cut the edges of the Deck and shoved them together. I've seen better concepts of how it'll look.
As an owner of a Steam Controller, it's actually pretty nice. It's probably the most ergonomic controller out there, though for functionality it hits a different niche than the typical controllers you find everywhere. Its better for some games, particularly ones designed for mouse, but worse for others. I'd bet on the Steam Controller 2 being very ergonomic and adding sticks, as well as the track pads, to be quite possibly the best controller available for every game (excluding keyboard and mouse obviously).
Like you said, these are Steam Deck prototypes, not the controller. They made a cheap controller with the same potential profile of the Deck without the screen because it's cheaper. It was to iterate on the Deck quickly and cheaply. They'd never release a controller like that. They do the same thing for all their products.
They already tried a ton of designs for the Steam Controller to figure out the ergonomics of that. They'll likely iterate some more with Version 2, but it's likely to follow the controller design, not the deck design. It has very different considerations since it doesn't need to contain a screen.
I would bet on the same hand grip bits and a similar set of back buttons. The touch pads will be revamped and it'll probably force the shape to change a lot.
I think the controllers sold relatively well though. Just not Steam Deck well. I know a good number of people who own at least one.