Valve released the Steam Controller in 2015 after iterating on the design in public for years. While the final product wasn’t quite as radical as the initial plans, which involved a touchscreen, two haptic trackpads, and no face buttons or analog sticks, it still took some time to get your thumbs around.
I know it had its (extremely vocal) fans, but personally I never got on with it. Even with face buttons and a left analog stick, the haptic trackpads never felt like great substitutes for a D-pad or a right stick to me. They did work better for certain mouse-driven games than a traditional controller, but real-time strategy on a sofa didn’t turn out to be a common enough use case; Valve discontinued the Steam Controller in 2019.
The Steam Deck retained certain elements of the Controller, however, most notably its trackpads. And now we have a new “Steam controller” of sorts: an officially branded joypad built by venerable Japanese peripheral maker Hori. It’s called the Wireless HoriPad for Steam, and for some reason it’s only available in Japan.
This is not a Steam Controller revival, exactly, but it does have some unique features.
