Check It Out: The Steam Controller in Action!

Valve dropped a video today showing off how the Steam Controller will work. Valve has been relatively quite following its announcement last month, and then they bust out and bring us this!

In the video, a Valve employee demonstrates how the controller works for a variety of games, including Portal 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Papers, Please; and Civilization V.

The Steam Controller will supposedly work with all past, present, and future games on Steam, including those not even built with controller support, which is mighty handy. The featured controller will also be the same one shipped to those 300 lucky Steam users who managed to hustle their way into the beta list. Good jobs guys, you suck. Obviously it’s still a prototype, but it manages to make quite the argument for Steam Machines in the vid.

According to Valve the controller will be able to do this by basically ‘tricking’ the games into thinking they are being played with a mouse and keyboard. Sounds pretty cray right? As you can see instead of traditional tried-and-true thumbsticks, the Steam controller has clickable dual trackpads instead.

A look at the Steam Controller

Apparently these trackpads can emulate a mouse or pretend to be some sort of D-pad-joystick monster hybrid combo and is then able to adjust depending on what you need for your game.

Valve also plans on providing alternative layouts for other popular games which don’t necessarily provide support for the controller. Obviously all of this is still in beta, but that doesn’t mean it still seems any less surreal. Granted the very idea that my controller could and will have anything but thumbsticks BLOWS MY MIND. Although it’s really gutsy for Valve to push against the status quo and shake up the world of video game controllers, my gut reaction still remains the same.

-pours money in change jar-

I want to be on board with this, even if my feeble mortal mind is far from prepared. So I’ll just wait here until somebody comes back and tells me how awesome this is. Otherwise the Steam Controller will be available along with Steam Machines sometime in 2014.