The Steam Controller’s troubled trackpads made for a better Steam Deck
PC or console? Mouse and keyboard, or controller? It’s a debate that’s raged for nearly as long as video games themselves. So in 2013, Valve — creator of games like Half-Life and Portal, and the founder of Steam, the beating heart of PC gaming — attempted to fuse the two camps together.
The Steam Controller was originally introduced as part of Valve’s Steam Machine push. The initiative attempted to convince partners to build gaming PCs that would sit in a living room like an Xbox or a PlayStation, but run the massive library of PC games already available on Steam. Plenty of PC owners have hooked up their computer to their television, but the Steam Machine project had bigger ambitions to turn living room PC gaming into a platform.
The problem was, most PC games don’t work well with a traditional gamepad. Valve needed something that could bridge those two worlds, and it came up with the Steam Controller and its curious, unique trackpads.
In many ways, the Steam Controller was the most controller ever made, creating a customizable skeleton key that could handle any control scheme or remapping you could throw at it, be it a mainstream game built for a traditional controller or a PC game that predated the advent of a mouse. It had buttons galore, a thumbstick, and even a gyroscope for aiming.
But the star of the show — and the most controversial aspect of the controller — was those dual trackpads, designed to both emulate a traditional mouse, a thumbstick, a trackball, a directional pad, or even other buttons. Instead of a regular thumbstick, which only allows for so much fine control, the trackpads worked similar to the one on your laptop, offering pinpoint accuracy for moving and aiming.
The haptic feedback was and
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