I love the readme on the gitlab page [1]. It feels so.. friendly :)
> This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck, under a Creative Commons license. This includes an STP model of each, an STL model of each, and an engineering drawing with critical features/keep outs for each.
Feel free to use these to make your own Puck holders, Controller sweaters, or whatever else you want to create!
Your Steam Controller is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want. That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Controller, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.
They also nickel and dime the adults, but only the ones who make the games.
It's fine though, because they're nice to players and they've brainwashed them into giving their money to Valve instead of to the developers who actually make the games they fucking play.
I agree that 30% is too large of a cut, but what would be appropriate? 15%? Steam does add a ton of value from an immediate audience, solid advertising opportunities, and amazing distribution for the developer.
As that has done both sides of games, I would like to propose some doubts for people to consider on that is dissimilar to the standard b2b saas; for to clarity I'm not saying 30% is good
- One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
- Amount of people that will take parents cards is eye watering
- The value of offline payment acceptance in the form of physical cards (kids do not possess standard payment rails but can acquire your game on steam in the cash)
- They don't take flat 30% for almost a decade now
- You don't often get to use Stripe or 2-3%. Your cost closer about 15% if you choose to process you own payments
> One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
This sounds like personal experience. Can you elaborate?
Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
> Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
Yes. In a sijmilar way: regular companies get Stripe at commodity pricing, games get xsolla, paysafe, tebex, and a massive compliance questionnaire, games are software (to you) but closer to porn or gambling on risk (to MoRs and processors).
People are less "likely" to charge back Steam because of their other games being frozen and Steam has volume to dilute chargebacks whereas you starting out may hit double digit dispute rates in one.
And doesn't forbid you from using their platform for free if you sell the keys by yourself and you can also decide to publish your game to other stores...
How about charging for services rendered based on cost to produce them rather than some arbitrary number. Some effective competition would be good, but likely outcome is publishers taking more.
I never understood people who argue steam doesn’t have real competition.
The number of fully funded attempts to compete with steam is impressive. Steam has more competition than any other of the major app stores. Steam also had to provide additional value over pre-existing methods of installing games on the PC in a way the Android Play Store or the PlayStation Store did not have to.
It is incredible how much the other stores fumbled the implementation. As a rule, Epic, Origin, etc apps were terrible. Laggy, bad UI, sometimes difficult to even complete a purchase.
You would have thought that close relationship with the games industry- someone must know how to make a high performance native application. Yet it always felt like web developers pumping out another half assed Electron platform. The Steam store must generate billions in revenue -put some real manpower behind the engineering.
I feel like that just becomes another situation where bigger organizations get more bargaining power and get better deals, so you’re just kind of shifting problems. I’m not saying a flat percentage like they have is necessarily the best solution, but I’m not sure trading problems is a good idea either. Just seems like a different way for smaller developers to get screwed.
They still do that, Valve popularized the concepts of battle passes (with Dota 2) and loot boxes (with Team Fortress 2). They also took a paid game with TF2 and added all that monetization after the fact.
Counter-Strike especially has a pretty nasty gambling scene that Valve refuses to control, even though its only possible because of their marketplace and APIs.
I really wish the company would talk more about the post-Gabe transition, or at least begin to give us a rough indication of where the company plans to go.
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
No company will ever do that. Even if they did, no one on the planet should expect it to play out as described. The whole anti-DRM position is based on the fact promises aren't worth a damn thing.
Publicly announced succession plans happen fairly regularly, especially for a company as stable as Valve. Tim Cook is 65 and just did so for Apple. The announcement of Ternus was hardly a bolt from the blue, either. Gabe is 63, and there is little to no indications.
This seems like the opposite of almost every family dynasty company that has ever existed. The second generation might keep things on track. The third generation never will.
Valve wasn't always like this. They were infamous for never allowing refunds, but due to EU regulations they just did a complete about face and has one of the friendliest refund policies in the ESD business. Probably just behind Costco or something.
The introduction of the refund made them get rid of their deep discounted flash sales though.
Real OGs remember that you could get fairly new AAA games for a song on, like, a random Wednesday. It was part of the initial appeal of Steam. Those explicitly went away because of the refund policy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/4pnd4p/psa_yes_there... (People were really upset at the time)
Their new refund policy is great, but it wasn't completely free to consumers.
I think at this point Steam might as well just release the hounds and let third parties build and sell steam compatible hardware (the Android play). Their own attempts have been, well, not great. Dealing with hardware supply chains is a very different game than software. They already have a platform, the hardware is purely for distribution. Whether they make a profit on hardware or not doesn't really matter. They are basically the opposite of Apple.
Steam already supports 3rd-party controllers and VR headsets. SteamOS is available on several 3rd-party handhelds. What more do you need for "steam compatible hardware"?
They aren't going to let you advertise them as Steam-branded hardware without an agreement, but there are multiple handhelds that have done so to be branded officially Steam Compatible.
They tried this many years ago with the original steam machines, it went horribly. Also, you can install SteamOS or Bazite on most machines. Not sure what the issue is here.
SteamOS does not currently really work on modern desktops/laptops. You can force it but it’s really not made for it. They’re pretty clear about that, I think they even pulled down the OS download page from their site and now clearly mark it as for restoring old machines.
Likely to change soon though with the steam machine release
Imagine if everybody did this. You break some stupid plastic part on something? No need to throw it away, just print an exact replacement on the spot. Or maybe tweak it first so it's less flimsy then print the replacement.
If you want a purple Steam Controller, you can load Valve's STL into your favorite slicer, 3D print a new shell, transplant the electronics, and you're done.
If you want a purple MacBook, could you do the same with those Apple PDFs?
Headphone piece broke. Replacement was covered under warranty. Once. After that it was $30 a pop from amazon for the replacement part. Both of the parts provided under warranty (it was a set of 2) broke in the same way.
Figured if the parts break that regularly, I would wind up spending $500 in just a few years on replacement parts, might as well just get a printer. The part already had a model available (it was apparently a common issue), and the printed version hasn't broken yet.
I know nothing about making models, so the fact that the community already had the replacement part ready to print for me was a huge win, and Valve doing this basically guarantees that there will be a variety of "Controller stand, with puck slot" and replacement part prints available. HUGE win.
It's a flavor of 3D modeling called "constraint-based." You've heard the adage that if you give a million monkeys typewriters, eventually one will write something coherent? Constraint systems embody that same idea: There are infinite possible 3D models. You keep adding constraints until you narrow it down to only one possible solution that fulfills all of them.
I've been learning FreeCAD, while it's still more frustrating than Fusion or SolidWorks it's much better than it used to be pre-1.1, and it's FOSS. Also constraint-based, I've been using the new spreadsheet view as the source of all constraint dimensions, with parts derived by binding to top, front, or right-side orthographic "master" sketches. Much like hand-drawn design, where you draw the orthographic views and use those directly to create an isometric view.
Large companies obviously are happy to screw their customers in various ways but I've had pretty good luck with smaller and especially more local businesses. I once had a jeweler gift me an ultrasonic cleaner when I asked them how best to clean a difficult to clean ring (presumably they had recently bought a new one).
Caring about the products they make and their customers seems like sorta the default for most people but large companies learn apathy eventually (or maybe it's mostly the companies that prioritize growth this way that become big). I wonder if less top down control at companies (especially by finance investors) would have them be better to consumers.
This was always the dream for 3D printing, heck going back to classic Star Trek replicators and other science fiction. Granted, even with these models available it's kinda difficult to print large organic shapes like the main housing shells on most affordable consumer printers so I suspect there might not be too many people actually doing it. However, having the exact CAD files makes designing mods and 3rd party upgrades much easier.
Going a step further, imagine hardware manufacturers noticing specific defects, then publishing new updated CAD files for a part that lasts better than the last, for customers who already have 3D printers to print their own upgrades/"patches".
That can work, but 3d printing doesn't in general make for strong parts (layers). Most of the time you want some form of molding or CNC subtractive machining (either plastic of metal) - while some hobbyists have this, 3d printing is far more common. (and often easier)
Nothing wrong with AP203, it has the most support in other software's.
Obviously AP214 would be nice for colors but the model is probably shrink-wrapped (AP242 is not needed, nobody needs PMI)
Just because it was withdrawn in 2005 does not exclude its wide use in industry
Even if Valve and Steam is great and overall a blessing for the PC space, I don't like the direction they take with this controller. It only works with Steam, it can't work on a desktop OS without it, despite standard layout. It is a subtle move towards a walled garden.
Windows is designed for gamepads to emulate an Xbox controller. All those Steam Deck competitors are implemented as an Xbox controller with a partial keyboard grafted on. That's why you need Legion Space or Armoury Crate to make them usable - they tell the controller firmware what keybindings to send for those rear paddles.
InputPlumber serves this purpose on Linux. Without it, you just get ABXY, start, select, nav, and shoulder buttons - the same layout that's been on the Xbox forever, because games don't understand the random partial keyboard that shares an internal USB hub with the Xbox pad clone. Thankfully on Linux, you're not stuck with one durable keybinding per paddle - once InputPlumber unifies that USB hub back into a controller, you can map all its buttons per-game with Steam Input.
It's not that Valve is making a proprietary controller - it's that the Windows gaming ecosystem assumes a proprietary controller, and Valve doesn't conform to that assumption. Instead, they provide a fully featured controller and let you configure it per-game in Steam. Considering Steam is the launcher most people use for most games, that's a totally reasonable tack.
I have used my PlayStation 4 controller on my Mac, iPhone, Windows 10, Windows 11.
I don't know much about controllers and their software but what makes it that Sony has no issues supporting a wide array of hardware, and Valve doesn't?
Microsoft has made such a mess of controller I/O that they were kind of forced to go with their jank translation layer made from scratch and running with their main product - it makes sense, especially built up piece by piece
Of course now that they've made controllers work properly, they'll use that work to support their own controller, and in particular enable features like analog triggers + gyro aiming + rumble (xinput can't do these simultaneously), extra buttons (xinput can't do this), and the trackpads (you guessed it).
And it is Windows, because on Linux the controller does work without Steam if you get the right drivers. It doesn't get the full features but it's functional as a gamepad, at least.
It does work as a keyboard/mouse without Steam. The idea is to have it default to something you can navigate the OS with until you launch steam big picture mode.
The original steam controller had a program to allow users to map the controls without steam, hopefully it will add support for the new one as well.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Operating systems don't typically include drivers out of the box for every single interface that could possibly connect to it. Often you'll get 'generic' drivers on Windows that at least map some of the basic inputs, but up until like late Windows 8 iirc Windows didn't even include that. Previously if you wanted to connect ANY controller to your PC you had to install third party drivers to make that work. So Valve bundling their controller drivers with steam just kinda... makes sense? Are you saying you would prefer to go find the drivers or have them written by not Valve instead? I really don't understand the 'walled garden' take here. You could go build your own drivers for this if you really wanted to, you don't need to use Valve's software.
I'm getting an 8BitDo because of the proprietary firmware on the Steam Controller. I can use the 8BitDo on all of my hardware. It doesn't have the trackpads but for the rest is a very solid controller and also has Hall effect joysticks.
As someone else said, the driver is in Steam, not SteamOS. Even on a Steam Deck you have to run Steam in desktop mode to have the buttons on the deck work.
Wait, really? So if you have two copies of the same game, one bought from Steam and the other from Epic Store, Steam Controller will only work for the Steam one?
Just add the launcher to steam, and you can set the input profile for the game just fine.
Better yet if you use Heroic instead of the official Epic launcher, it will let you add the game directly to Steam.
This is basically how people use 3rd party games on the steam deck. You want them added to steam as 3rd party games for easy access in game mode, so you just add any non-steam games to steam. Heroic and other launchers make it pretty effortless, but you can do it manually as well.
Id bet some money it has more to do with certification. Consoles ban 3rd party controllers that provide a competitive edge. Steam controller is exactly that.
I don't fully understand this narrative that is going around about scalpers and the controller. So many people online are claiming it was only scalpers who were able to purchase one. I am also not a scalper (as someone else said), and was able to purchase one. We don't know how many they actually had in stock in total but let's say it's around 30K, from what I have searched on eBay and other reselling sites it would only seem like less than 1% of the stock is being sold by resellers/scalpers. I think it was just a high demand product. I know scalpers are a problem in much of the entertainment industry right now, but it's also becoming a scape goat for anything you just weren't able to buy yourself. It's quite annoying and getting old fast.
It’s hard to participate in any gaming communities because you quickly realize they’re all kids who have no idea about markets but they all talk like foremost experts on every subject
I managed to buy one, I also have no intention to sell it anytime soon. I do wish there were better protections against scalpers though, they are a blight.
It's also very important to understand that Valve has 100% control of the marketplace. They don't have to hope that Best Buy or Walmart or whatever secure their system against scalpers. They can enforce account history requirements and rate limiting or what ever they please.
I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't do that.
These days it's hard to tell and there's always a mix of both with any high demand items so it makes the stock limits even more pronounced. With how Valve has done hardware releases lately though I imagine it's more a stock limitation.
Is it really? I go to my "local" second-hand marketplace and I see countless of listings for the new Valve Controller. I think it's fair to say most of those aren't "Ops, I made a purchase and I can't return it" but most likely being scalpers. No doubt, some of them are fake as well, but regardless, tends to be fairly easy to see when things are being scalped or if it's actually just high demand, if it's the latter, you don't see tons of second-hand listings the day after it opened.
Right, they're saying you only see the side of the resellers, you have no idea the number of people who purchased it to keep it (like many of us in the thread). So in reality you may be only seeing less than 1% of stock for resell and not the 99% that are just buying it to keep it like normal. It's just confirmation bias that you assume everyone is buying to resell it cause that's all you're able to see.
I also got one and didn't think scalpers were the problem at the time. I have since seen eBay listings of people trying to sell the controllers (that they don't even have yet) for 3x the price, though, so they maybe did play a role. There was a limit of 2 controllers per Steam account and they sold out within 30 minutes, so not sure if bots were used or what. There wasn't a lot of time to mess around. I've seen a lot of people who wanted one couldn't get one. Personally I added it to my cart about 2 minutes before the official start time and then it took 12 minutes or so of retrying to actually check out.
I got 2. 1 for me and 1 for my brother. I sat with the page loaded and waiting. It opened a few minutes early and I was able to still order a 2nd about 5 minutes into sale
I know the steam deck had good scalper limitations. You had to have a steam account in good standing (no vac bans) that had a game purchase from before the deck was available for purchase, as well as a limit of how many one account could purchase.
There was a limit of 2 steam controllers for this sale, but it sounds like that limit was only per transaction, and didn't prevent an account from placing multiple transactions (if the store would load for long enough to allow it). I don't think any of the other limitations were in place.
I think nobody but valve knows and they are not telling us. We don't know how many units were sold and how the protections were (at least I didn't see anything). Some people seem to assume that scalpers are to blame when a product is sold out really fast (which is understandable when looking at past hardware releases).
Me, I don't think so. I just think people really wanted to get one.
How does it work if this is under the creative commons license? Can 3rd parties sell this controller per the model? Other 3rd party vendors got around this by making a very minor change.
Compare it to Sony who still put potentiometers in their controllers. Good luck desoldering and replacing that once analogs inevitably start to drift. It's super easy to damage something else in the process as I learned.
I love the readme on the gitlab page [1]. It feels so.. friendly :)
> This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck, under a Creative Commons license. This includes an STP model of each, an STL model of each, and an engineering drawing with critical features/keep outs for each.
Feel free to use these to make your own Puck holders, Controller sweaters, or whatever else you want to create!
Your Steam Controller is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want. That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Controller, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.
[1] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamHardware/SteamController
Sometimes I wonder what we did to deserve Valve and how long it can possibly last.
We let kids gamble so much money in games that they don't have to nickel and dime the adults.
They also nickel and dime the adults, but only the ones who make the games.
It's fine though, because they're nice to players and they've brainwashed them into giving their money to Valve instead of to the developers who actually make the games they fucking play.
I agree that 30% is too large of a cut, but what would be appropriate? 15%? Steam does add a ton of value from an immediate audience, solid advertising opportunities, and amazing distribution for the developer.
As that has done both sides of games, I would like to propose some doubts for people to consider on that is dissimilar to the standard b2b saas; for to clarity I'm not saying 30% is good
- One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
- Amount of people that will take parents cards is eye watering
- The value of offline payment acceptance in the form of physical cards (kids do not possess standard payment rails but can acquire your game on steam in the cash)
- They don't take flat 30% for almost a decade now
- You don't often get to use Stripe or 2-3%. Your cost closer about 15% if you choose to process you own payments
> They don't take flat 30% for almost a decade now
Yes Valve is very graceous.
They take MORE from developers who make LESS money. I sure bottom 98% of developers never sell above $10,000,000 to decrease cut from 30% to 25%.
PS: In practice if your project funded by publisher it means that you as developer will make less money from a game than Valve.
Very few indie devs or small indie studios ever sell over 50,000-100,000 copies.
> One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
This sounds like personal experience. Can you elaborate?
Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
> Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
Yes. In a sijmilar way: regular companies get Stripe at commodity pricing, games get xsolla, paysafe, tebex, and a massive compliance questionnaire, games are software (to you) but closer to porn or gambling on risk (to MoRs and processors).
People are less "likely" to charge back Steam because of their other games being frozen and Steam has volume to dilute chargebacks whereas you starting out may hit double digit dispute rates in one.
And doesn't forbid you from using their platform for free if you sell the keys by yourself and you can also decide to publish your game to other stores...
Linux releases they only take 10% FWIW
That sounds great but I can't find any information about it. Do you have a link, please?
Nope
How about charging for services rendered based on cost to produce them rather than some arbitrary number. Some effective competition would be good, but likely outcome is publishers taking more.
I never understood people who argue steam doesn’t have real competition.
The number of fully funded attempts to compete with steam is impressive. Steam has more competition than any other of the major app stores. Steam also had to provide additional value over pre-existing methods of installing games on the PC in a way the Android Play Store or the PlayStation Store did not have to.
It is incredible how much the other stores fumbled the implementation. As a rule, Epic, Origin, etc apps were terrible. Laggy, bad UI, sometimes difficult to even complete a purchase.
You would have thought that close relationship with the games industry- someone must know how to make a high performance native application. Yet it always felt like web developers pumping out another half assed Electron platform. The Steam store must generate billions in revenue -put some real manpower behind the engineering.
I feel like that just becomes another situation where bigger organizations get more bargaining power and get better deals, so you’re just kind of shifting problems. I’m not saying a flat percentage like they have is necessarily the best solution, but I’m not sure trading problems is a good idea either. Just seems like a different way for smaller developers to get screwed.
Plenty of devs choose to sell on other platforms or directly and do fine. Steam doesn't have a monopoly on games the way Apple and Google do
Again that old, tired argument. nobody has a gun to the devs head to force them to sell on steam
That's true now, but Valve has been like this since the start, way before skins and microtransactions.
You’re ignoring how much of a role the TF2 hats played in pushing microtransaction skins.
Steam came out in 2003. TF2 hats came out in 2009. It’s lived in the world of micro transactions way longer than it lived in the before times.
Most other companies would still nickel and dime the adults, though.
They still do that, Valve popularized the concepts of battle passes (with Dota 2) and loot boxes (with Team Fortress 2). They also took a paid game with TF2 and added all that monetization after the fact.
Counter-Strike especially has a pretty nasty gambling scene that Valve refuses to control, even though its only possible because of their marketplace and APIs.
"We" is the kids' parents, and I would assume it's the parents' money.
Gabe better be immortal.
I really wish the company would talk more about the post-Gabe transition, or at least begin to give us a rough indication of where the company plans to go.
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
AFAIK his son has been working there for quite a while and is the heir apparent.
I don't know anything about his son, but hopefully "don't screw up your father's legacy" is a core tenet for him. That news gives me slight hope.
They have a vat with brain hookups[0] waiting to place Gabe in, so immortality is nigh. No post-Gabe transition needed.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/2XbM18n
edit: fixed image link
No company will ever do that. Even if they did, no one on the planet should expect it to play out as described. The whole anti-DRM position is based on the fact promises aren't worth a damn thing.
Publicly announced succession plans happen fairly regularly, especially for a company as stable as Valve. Tim Cook is 65 and just did so for Apple. The announcement of Ternus was hardly a bolt from the blue, either. Gabe is 63, and there is little to no indications.
He’s going to die in a fucking scuba diving accident, I have nightmares about it constantly
I highly doubt it for a number of factors.
- Most of his dives look to be rec depth
- He isn't running any crazy gear like a CCR
- He has instant access to a chamber, so any DCS worries are virtually zero
- There is no go-itis for him. If weather is bad, he just packs up and sails to somewhere nicer
Out of all the rich people hobbies, scuba is about the safest
Have you warned Gabe about this
Hope Linus isn't on that same expedition.
I just wish they made more games than they currently do. Their games are always nicely polished and unique / creative in their own respect.
If your “we” is Australia, you could have implemented consumer protections then sued Valve for ignoring them: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...
That was 9 years ago.
Are they compliant in the Australian market now?
Valve will only be good if it stays privately owned. Good things go to shit as soon as investors become involved
I'm optimistic provided they continue to be privately held and don't parachute in a professional executive to be CEO after Gabe departs.
This is the answer. Enshitification is a requirement of the fiduciary duty of public companies. A private company can stay good forever.
Fiduciary duty doesn’t mean what you think it does.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042915/what-are-som...
Until the current management retires, as it usually goes.
In my experience family held companies do tend to keep their values somewhat intact on succession.
This seems like the opposite of almost every family dynasty company that has ever existed. The second generation might keep things on track. The third generation never will.
I think many more companies would operate like this if acquisition and mergers were much more difficult.
Valve wasn't always like this. They were infamous for never allowing refunds, but due to EU regulations they just did a complete about face and has one of the friendliest refund policies in the ESD business. Probably just behind Costco or something.
The introduction of the refund made them get rid of their deep discounted flash sales though.
Real OGs remember that you could get fairly new AAA games for a song on, like, a random Wednesday. It was part of the initial appeal of Steam. Those explicitly went away because of the refund policy. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/4pnd4p/psa_yes_there... (People were really upset at the time)
Their new refund policy is great, but it wasn't completely free to consumers.
They still have absolutely massive sales, they just aren't random anymore.
At least personally, I'd prefer having to wait a few months and having a good refund policy over more sales
I love steam. I have a lot of concerns with a lot of the companies shuffling billions around. But not steam. They treat everyone fair.
The gambling thing is whack but at least it's not polymarket.
I think at this point Steam might as well just release the hounds and let third parties build and sell steam compatible hardware (the Android play). Their own attempts have been, well, not great. Dealing with hardware supply chains is a very different game than software. They already have a platform, the hardware is purely for distribution. Whether they make a profit on hardware or not doesn't really matter. They are basically the opposite of Apple.
Steam already supports 3rd-party controllers and VR headsets. SteamOS is available on several 3rd-party handhelds. What more do you need for "steam compatible hardware"?
As far as I know there's nothing preventing third parties from building and selling hardware with SteamOS or a similar software stack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS
They aren't going to let you advertise them as Steam-branded hardware without an agreement, but there are multiple handhelds that have done so to be branded officially Steam Compatible.
They tried this many years ago with the original steam machines, it went horribly. Also, you can install SteamOS or Bazite on most machines. Not sure what the issue is here.
SteamOS does not currently really work on modern desktops/laptops. You can force it but it’s really not made for it. They’re pretty clear about that, I think they even pulled down the OS download page from their site and now clearly mark it as for restoring old machines.
Likely to change soon though with the steam machine release
What is "Steam compatible hardware"? Isn't that like saying "App Store compatible hardware"?
Imagine if everybody did this. You break some stupid plastic part on something? No need to throw it away, just print an exact replacement on the spot. Or maybe tweak it first so it's less flimsy then print the replacement.
Sounds like this is just the external dimensions? That's mostly just useful for creating accessories. That's not too special, Apple does this too. https://developer.apple.com/accessories/dimensional-drawings...
Those PDFs are useless.
If you want a purple Steam Controller, you can load Valve's STL into your favorite slicer, 3D print a new shell, transplant the electronics, and you're done.
If you want a purple MacBook, could you do the same with those Apple PDFs?
No, you can't, because it doesn't include any internal topology.
> This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck
This is why I bought a 3d printer.
Headphone piece broke. Replacement was covered under warranty. Once. After that it was $30 a pop from amazon for the replacement part. Both of the parts provided under warranty (it was a set of 2) broke in the same way.
Figured if the parts break that regularly, I would wind up spending $500 in just a few years on replacement parts, might as well just get a printer. The part already had a model available (it was apparently a common issue), and the printed version hasn't broken yet.
I know nothing about making models, so the fact that the community already had the replacement part ready to print for me was a huge win, and Valve doing this basically guarantees that there will be a variety of "Controller stand, with puck slot" and replacement part prints available. HUGE win.
Fusion is a really cool tool to learn.
It's a flavor of 3D modeling called "constraint-based." You've heard the adage that if you give a million monkeys typewriters, eventually one will write something coherent? Constraint systems embody that same idea: There are infinite possible 3D models. You keep adding constraints until you narrow it down to only one possible solution that fulfills all of them.
I've been learning FreeCAD, while it's still more frustrating than Fusion or SolidWorks it's much better than it used to be pre-1.1, and it's FOSS. Also constraint-based, I've been using the new spreadsheet view as the source of all constraint dimensions, with parts derived by binding to top, front, or right-side orthographic "master" sketches. Much like hand-drawn design, where you draw the orthographic views and use those directly to create an isometric view.
Large companies obviously are happy to screw their customers in various ways but I've had pretty good luck with smaller and especially more local businesses. I once had a jeweler gift me an ultrasonic cleaner when I asked them how best to clean a difficult to clean ring (presumably they had recently bought a new one).
Caring about the products they make and their customers seems like sorta the default for most people but large companies learn apathy eventually (or maybe it's mostly the companies that prioritize growth this way that become big). I wonder if less top down control at companies (especially by finance investors) would have them be better to consumers.
This was always the dream for 3D printing, heck going back to classic Star Trek replicators and other science fiction. Granted, even with these models available it's kinda difficult to print large organic shapes like the main housing shells on most affordable consumer printers so I suspect there might not be too many people actually doing it. However, having the exact CAD files makes designing mods and 3rd party upgrades much easier.
Going a step further, imagine hardware manufacturers noticing specific defects, then publishing new updated CAD files for a part that lasts better than the last, for customers who already have 3D printers to print their own upgrades/"patches".
That can work, but 3d printing doesn't in general make for strong parts (layers). Most of the time you want some form of molding or CNC subtractive machining (either plastic of metal) - while some hobbyists have this, 3d printing is far more common. (and often easier)
"FILE_DESCRIPTION((''),'2;1'); FILE_NAME('IBEX_SOLID','2025-11-20T09:57:55',('stevec'),(''), 'CREO PARAMETRIC BY PTC INC, 2020454','CREO PARAMETRIC BY PTC INC, 2020454','');"
Glad to see that valve is using the best CAD software :)
Using a data schema standard that was withdrawn in 2005.
Nothing wrong with AP203, it has the most support in other software's. Obviously AP214 would be nice for colors but the model is probably shrink-wrapped (AP242 is not needed, nobody needs PMI)
Just because it was withdrawn in 2005 does not exclude its wide use in industry
They are not even using the newest version of AP203.
I will feel free to ignore comments on AP242 from PTC if they can't be bothered to use it.>2020454
And the latest!
Even if Valve and Steam is great and overall a blessing for the PC space, I don't like the direction they take with this controller. It only works with Steam, it can't work on a desktop OS without it, despite standard layout. It is a subtle move towards a walled garden.
I'm not sure that's Steam's fault.
Windows is designed for gamepads to emulate an Xbox controller. All those Steam Deck competitors are implemented as an Xbox controller with a partial keyboard grafted on. That's why you need Legion Space or Armoury Crate to make them usable - they tell the controller firmware what keybindings to send for those rear paddles.
InputPlumber serves this purpose on Linux. Without it, you just get ABXY, start, select, nav, and shoulder buttons - the same layout that's been on the Xbox forever, because games don't understand the random partial keyboard that shares an internal USB hub with the Xbox pad clone. Thankfully on Linux, you're not stuck with one durable keybinding per paddle - once InputPlumber unifies that USB hub back into a controller, you can map all its buttons per-game with Steam Input.
It's not that Valve is making a proprietary controller - it's that the Windows gaming ecosystem assumes a proprietary controller, and Valve doesn't conform to that assumption. Instead, they provide a fully featured controller and let you configure it per-game in Steam. Considering Steam is the launcher most people use for most games, that's a totally reasonable tack.
I have used my PlayStation 4 controller on my Mac, iPhone, Windows 10, Windows 11.
I don't know much about controllers and their software but what makes it that Sony has no issues supporting a wide array of hardware, and Valve doesn't?
Microsoft has made such a mess of controller I/O that they were kind of forced to go with their jank translation layer made from scratch and running with their main product - it makes sense, especially built up piece by piece
Of course now that they've made controllers work properly, they'll use that work to support their own controller, and in particular enable features like analog triggers + gyro aiming + rumble (xinput can't do these simultaneously), extra buttons (xinput can't do this), and the trackpads (you guessed it).
And it is Windows, because on Linux the controller does work without Steam if you get the right drivers. It doesn't get the full features but it's functional as a gamepad, at least.
> It doesn’t get the full features but it’s functional as a gamepad at least
So it’s the controller and not Windows then, if partial functionality is okay (which seems fine to me).
It does work as a keyboard/mouse without Steam. The idea is to have it default to something you can navigate the OS with until you launch steam big picture mode.
The original steam controller had a program to allow users to map the controls without steam, hopefully it will add support for the new one as well.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Operating systems don't typically include drivers out of the box for every single interface that could possibly connect to it. Often you'll get 'generic' drivers on Windows that at least map some of the basic inputs, but up until like late Windows 8 iirc Windows didn't even include that. Previously if you wanted to connect ANY controller to your PC you had to install third party drivers to make that work. So Valve bundling their controller drivers with steam just kinda... makes sense? Are you saying you would prefer to go find the drivers or have them written by not Valve instead? I really don't understand the 'walled garden' take here. You could go build your own drivers for this if you really wanted to, you don't need to use Valve's software.
I'm getting an 8BitDo because of the proprietary firmware on the Steam Controller. I can use the 8BitDo on all of my hardware. It doesn't have the trackpads but for the rest is a very solid controller and also has Hall effect joysticks.
Kinda. SteamOS is open source, so it's not really walled.
It's possible they deferred making generic drivers to release faster and those will come out later,kinda like steamOS windows drivers came out later
The driver exists in the proprietary Steam client, not in SteamOS itself.
As someone else said, the driver is in Steam, not SteamOS. Even on a Steam Deck you have to run Steam in desktop mode to have the buttons on the deck work.
Wait, really? So if you have two copies of the same game, one bought from Steam and the other from Epic Store, Steam Controller will only work for the Steam one?
Just add the launcher to steam, and you can set the input profile for the game just fine.
Better yet if you use Heroic instead of the official Epic launcher, it will let you add the game directly to Steam.
This is basically how people use 3rd party games on the steam deck. You want them added to steam as 3rd party games for easy access in game mode, so you just add any non-steam games to steam. Heroic and other launchers make it pretty effortless, but you can do it manually as well.
The controller will work with Steam running in the background
You can add any executable to Steam, not only the games they sell, as far as I know.
Id bet some money it has more to do with certification. Consoles ban 3rd party controllers that provide a competitive edge. Steam controller is exactly that.
Files are here: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamHardware/SteamController
If only scalpers didn’t scoop up every unit
I don't fully understand this narrative that is going around about scalpers and the controller. So many people online are claiming it was only scalpers who were able to purchase one. I am also not a scalper (as someone else said), and was able to purchase one. We don't know how many they actually had in stock in total but let's say it's around 30K, from what I have searched on eBay and other reselling sites it would only seem like less than 1% of the stock is being sold by resellers/scalpers. I think it was just a high demand product. I know scalpers are a problem in much of the entertainment industry right now, but it's also becoming a scape goat for anything you just weren't able to buy yourself. It's quite annoying and getting old fast.
It’s hard to participate in any gaming communities because you quickly realize they’re all kids who have no idea about markets but they all talk like foremost experts on every subject
I managed to buy one, I also have no intention to sell it anytime soon. I do wish there were better protections against scalpers though, they are a blight.
It's also very important to understand that Valve has 100% control of the marketplace. They don't have to hope that Best Buy or Walmart or whatever secure their system against scalpers. They can enforce account history requirements and rate limiting or what ever they please.
I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't do that.
I really wonder how many scalpers there were. I got one. I am not a scalper. Maybe it was just high demand for limited stock.
These days it's hard to tell and there's always a mix of both with any high demand items so it makes the stock limits even more pronounced. With how Valve has done hardware releases lately though I imagine it's more a stock limitation.
> These days it's hard to tell
Is it really? I go to my "local" second-hand marketplace and I see countless of listings for the new Valve Controller. I think it's fair to say most of those aren't "Ops, I made a purchase and I can't return it" but most likely being scalpers. No doubt, some of them are fake as well, but regardless, tends to be fairly easy to see when things are being scalped or if it's actually just high demand, if it's the latter, you don't see tons of second-hand listings the day after it opened.
I understand but you don't know how many people got one to keep it compared to how many just resell it.
> but you don't know how many people got one to keep it compared to how many just resell it
But you do? If someone puts it up on second-hand markets, they're not intending to keep it, they're intending to resell it, why put it up otherwise?
Right, they're saying you only see the side of the resellers, you have no idea the number of people who purchased it to keep it (like many of us in the thread). So in reality you may be only seeing less than 1% of stock for resell and not the 99% that are just buying it to keep it like normal. It's just confirmation bias that you assume everyone is buying to resell it cause that's all you're able to see.
I also got one and didn't think scalpers were the problem at the time. I have since seen eBay listings of people trying to sell the controllers (that they don't even have yet) for 3x the price, though, so they maybe did play a role. There was a limit of 2 controllers per Steam account and they sold out within 30 minutes, so not sure if bots were used or what. There wasn't a lot of time to mess around. I've seen a lot of people who wanted one couldn't get one. Personally I added it to my cart about 2 minutes before the official start time and then it took 12 minutes or so of retrying to actually check out.
I got 2. 1 for me and 1 for my brother. I sat with the page loaded and waiting. It opened a few minutes early and I was able to still order a 2nd about 5 minutes into sale
I got one a day later.
I think valve typically has pretty good scalper protection. Was that not the case this time?
I know the steam deck had good scalper limitations. You had to have a steam account in good standing (no vac bans) that had a game purchase from before the deck was available for purchase, as well as a limit of how many one account could purchase.
There was a limit of 2 steam controllers for this sale, but it sounds like that limit was only per transaction, and didn't prevent an account from placing multiple transactions (if the store would load for long enough to allow it). I don't think any of the other limitations were in place.
I think nobody but valve knows and they are not telling us. We don't know how many units were sold and how the protections were (at least I didn't see anything). Some people seem to assume that scalpers are to blame when a product is sold out really fast (which is understandable when looking at past hardware releases).
Me, I don't think so. I just think people really wanted to get one.
How does it work if this is under the creative commons license? Can 3rd parties sell this controller per the model? Other 3rd party vendors got around this by making a very minor change.
There exist multiple CC variations, this instance is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 wouldn't let you sell it no
Compare it to Sony who still put potentiometers in their controllers. Good luck desoldering and replacing that once analogs inevitably start to drift. It's super easy to damage something else in the process as I learned.
Amazing. This is gonna be useful for my handheld project.
W valve - Good Guy Gabe does it again.
More companies should do this when they discontinue hardware. The community will keep it alive longer than you ever would, and it costs you nothing.
This is the brand new Steam Controller though, not the old, discontinued one.