Valve ditching the touchscreen on its Steam Controller

 

 

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Valve ditching the touchscreen on its Steam Controller
1/15/2014 8:57:36 PM

Valve has plans to change the current state of its Steam Controller, before it begins shipping with Steam Machines from a slew of manufacturers later this year.

The company announced at its Steam Dev Days developer summit on Wednesday that it will remove the controller's central touchscreen. It is being removed because it was seen as redundant, and instead, Valve wants gamers looking at their television rather than at their controller to see what's happening.

It was once a high-resolution screen that supported both gestures and clicks, allowing a player to touch the screen, swipe through pages of actions, scroll through menus and more. Not anymore, though.

Read: Valve shows how Steam Controller will work with any game

Valve will add a "ghosting" mode to the controller to replace the touchscreen. It is presumed the controller will still have a touchpad in the middle, and the ghosting mode will visualise a user's fingers moving across the touchpad and on to the screen to access virtual buttons.

Additionally, the Steam Controller will see its existing ABXY buttons moved into a diamond shape that is found on the Xbox 360, Valve announced. This will help with backwards compatibility of older games. After all, Valve is promising support for any game out there. We may also see the addition of a directional pad to the controller, as well.

Valve announced twelve companies it's partnering with for official Steam Machines in 2014. Alienware, Falcon Northwest, iBuyPower, CyberPowerPC, Origin PC, Gigabyte, Materiel.net, Webhallen, Alternate, Next, Zotac, Scan Computers, and others, will all be shipping a Steam Machine bundled with a Steam Controller at some point in 2014. 

 

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