It wasn't that the Steam Controller was a shoddy piece of hardware. That analogy is, perhaps, the best fit for the Steam Controller's launch-day, gyro-free review debacle. Imagine giving a caveman a revolver: he'll shoot himself and tell you what a terrible club it makes. Rather hilariously, the New York Times declared "after 15 hours of research and testing," that the DualShock 4 was the best PC gaming controller, saying they would not recommend the Steam Controller "until Valve releases better hardware." Using it without gyro aiming enabled will cripple your accuracy. The touchpad is only one half of the Steam Controller experience. Reviews, like this one on IGN, bemoaned how difficult it was to aim with the Steam Controller's touchpad in games like GTA V. Once you're plus/minus a few pixels from your target, the gyro kicks in to help you line up that headshot.Ī properly-configured Steam Controller profile with gyro aiming The trackpads themselves are designed for flick-aiming speed, not accuracy: flicking the right touchpad is meant to get your scope in the general vicinity of a target, far faster than an analog stick. By default, the gyroscope is enabled on "right pad touch." It only activates when your thumb flicks the right pad. In first-person shooters, users are supposed to use the trackpads to flick their view in the general direction of a target, then use the gyro for fine aim. It's hard to emphasize this enough: gyro aim is a critical part of the Steam Controller experience. In almost all initial Steam Controller reviews, reviewers appeared to use the Steam controller with gyro aiming disabled, relying just on the trackpads. Gyro aiming on the Steam Controller isn't a Sixaxis-style gimmick: it works in tandem with the right touchpad to provide mouse-like accuracy. Gyro aiming is critical to the Steam Controller experience Going through initial reviews, one key area stands out on account of its omission: apart from an Engadget writeup, almost no one who reviewed the Steam Controller at launch appeared to have any idea about how gyroscopic aiming works on it. When the Steam Controller launched in 2015, reviewers across the industry panned it, not just for being hard to use, but somehow less accurate than a standard controller with dual analog sticks. This was what they came up with? There really wasn't a better way? – PC Gamer.Everytime I put it head-to-head against a standard Xbox 360 controller, Microsoft's stock gamepad came out ahead – TechRadar.It offers a mediocre gaming experience the majority of the time – IGN.But, more unfairly, it's been characterized as a "bad" controller, with reviews criticizing everything from build quality to software, and the process of just getting the damn thing to work.īut the rest is the story of how a poor launch-day experience and impatient reviewers murdered what could have been the biggest paradigm shift in gaming input since Sony introduced dual analog sticks with the 1997 Dualshock.Ī well-loved Steam Controller - Image: ALensAndSomeLuckīut, what went wrong with the Steam Controller? Is it as bad as initial reviews made it out to be? And what does the future hold for the new technologies it introduced? You're using it wrong! The case of the missing gyroscope It was widely seen as a commercial failure – which it was, with a mere 500,000 lifetime units sold. Valve killed off the Steam Controller last year. I've tried Microsoft's controller, the DualShock and DualSense, and even the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller. Over the past five years, the Steam Controller has been my go-to device for PC gaming from the couch. No, I'm not crazy, and I'm not a collector of failed tech, either.
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