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- 5 days
I’m sure it’s a great controller, but for me personally it’s just way too expensive. Also, I’m never gonna use the trackpads outside of a Steam Deck.
I’d consider my current controller (GameSir Supernova) to be the best one I’ve ever used. For the price of one Steam Controller I could get 2.5 of those. It also comes with a very convenient charging station, which you can plug the receiver into, and then it’s a 2-in-1.
I rarely criticize Valve, but their recent pricing is out of this world. I have no idea what their profit margins are on these devices, but I just cannot imagine them being competitive.
As much as I love my og LCD Deck, I’d never buy it at the current price. Same for the controller.
5 daysThe 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.
- 7 days
Mine shows 2027 estimate :( was hoping to replace my Vader 5 Pro with its pretty abysmal software situation with the Steam Controller soon, but I guess not
Can the Vader 5 Pro just use Steam Input? I thought there was an “Allow Third Party Apps to take over” setting.
I was looking at one of those but not having Steam Input would be a deal breaker. I am so tired of expensive hardware having shite software. It isn’t a hard problem to solve - they just don’t want to
- 4 days
Yes that setting does exist, and it does work by letting Steam directly take over control of all the extra buttons on the controller… HOWEVER. It does a really bizarre thing where Steam will see multiple instances of the controller, one is the “correct” one, another is a basic Xbox 360 controller, and if you happen to power cycle the controller while Steam is running, then often the controller will not work at all anymore until you shut down Steam, then power cycle the controller again, then start up Steam again. I’ve seen other people reporting even more duplicates in Steam too, potentially based on whether you’ve installed Steam’s extended Xbox controller driver? Not totally sure.
Also, while Steam is open, the controller doesn’t work at all with any games not launched through Steam (game pass games, other launchers, etc.). There are workarounds for this, but still annoying.
It is supported in ReWASD now, but I think that gets fiddly when you have ReWASD and Steam running at the same time; I haven’t really tried a proper setup in ReWASD yet.
Overall, just a very frustrating and inconsistent experience. When it’s working, I really love it, but then there are nights where I spend 3 hours troubleshooting instead of just playing games.
Hmm okay you’ve given me a lot to think about. Thank you for this. I really appreciate the honesty
Well, on the one hand… having more demand than you can actually fulfill is the kind of problem most busineses would like to have…
I mean… even if they’re not moving a lot of units, its still broadly a good problem to have -> considerably more people than you thought, want to buy the thing you sell.
So at bare minimum you’ve over delivered in terms of product design.
The extremely obvious capitalist response to that would be to raise prices on that thing. Win win, right? The extra profits go toward more capex to make more future production.
… But they haven’t done that.
They haven’t done that because they care about their image more than their profit margins on this particular product.
And/or because in the current environment… basically, the cost/reward on spending more capex isn’t worth the reputation hit.
The capex spending to meaningfully ramp up production would be so expensive, that it’d end up being a net loss, in terms of reputation damage.
… At least this is my semi-informed guess.
