Gadgetory

your hardware canucks 2014 CS coverage is brought to you by and cix technology connected alright guys i'm here with greg from valve and what we're going to be discussing right now is probably one of the most innovative things to hit gaming since I you know what since Atari and Nintendo basically that's the pedestal I'm putting this on because of the fact that this is probably the biggest thing to hit gaming the biggest innovation hit gaming in an extremely long time and I'm incredibly excited to talk about it so what are you holding your hand right now this is the steam controller it really was built in order to allow gamers to be in the living room and have access to the complete steam catalog awesome now this is going to feature a lot of customizability but you're going to be doing a lot of crowd sourcing for the button mapping how are you going to go about doing that what really steamed gives us a kind of a jet get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to supporting a hardware device on on a PC the input device it used to be that you'd bring a innovative input device home and you'd have to wrestle with configuration for each individual game that you wanted to play or hope that you know the maker of the hardware device had built something that would facilitate that process but steam lets us sit in between individual titles and gamers and provide a lot of that value through button mappings but not just ones that we've authored you know back at steam HQ but ones that we've workshops through the community so that everybody on the in the community is deciding helping to decide what is the best default binding set for each game and you know there are thousands of games on Steam at this point none of them have been designed with the steam controller in mind all those games some of them have been designed for traditional controller but when you play most of the catalog the games think that they're being played by a mouse and keyboard this device emulates both of those hardware devices in such a way that it's seamless for the game but there needs to be a translation layer it needs to you know when I press one of these buttons on the face of the controller it needs to be an intermediary deciding oh that that actually maps to the spacebar and it helps jump in this game for example and the community is going to help decide what's the best mapping between between those services and this is just an early prototype right this is an early prototype we've sent three hundred of these to end users theme a lot of these are also going to content Parker's right now so we're getting a tremendous amount of useful feedback from people who are having a chance to play really the whole catalogue of games using the controller also know I know from personal experience that whenever you try to come up with something you are going to come up with and meet a lot of different roadblocks can you go into a little bit of an explanation as to some of the roadblocks that you guys have experienced and how you actually overcame them so I think that's a really important key piece to explaining how you guys got this to market well we're still getting it to market the kinds of roadblocks we have encountered along a design process we're ones where initially we it was a daunting task to look at what PC gamers have always had as far as input goes is about a hundred and four keys on the standard windows keyboard and a tremendously high resolution 2d pointing device for analog style input with a mouse and the prospect of taking all those things and putting him into a package that was comfortable in your hands but didn't force you to lug in those legacy devices to sit on your sofa cushions it was really some of the that was the tall order that we we felt like we had to figure out yet and this device is the one that we think actually on those fundamental requirements that we've accomplished our goal that you can actually sit down and play the entire steam catalog and have access to all those functions in a way that is pretty great experience so that was that was the thing that you know we started with early prototypes with around track balls and all kinds of different you know we built controllers that had a number of buttons on them because we were just you know we're doing the inventory and trying out early experiments but getting to the point where we we realized that through a combination of software that runs inside the device and that runs on Steam and a clever hardware design that we came up with a solution that we think it's going to work and on the retail I've heard rumors that these buttons here are going to be touchscreen you know that's the current plan so actually a lot of that inventory on a keyboard traditional keyboard is it access through the touch screen here in the center of the screen we're going through some design revisions right now based on some of the feedback that we're seeing from end users and we've actually been pleasantly surprised about how well people are able to play the entire catalog in advance of that functioning existing so we're kind of reevaluating the button layout and a number of features as we have had designed it before we feel really fortunate because being able to do this in public with real users it's making us way more confident in our design decisions then we would be if it was all being done behind closed doors so guys this has been our I guess sneak peek at the steam machine controller and I can tell you from playing with it it feels incredible it's got great feedback the button layout I'm gonna be honest with you i love the button layout i think it's perfect just the way it is i mean if you change it I'll deal with it all adapt but guys I'm incredibly excited for us i can't wait for launch to happen i can't wait to get one in my hands so I complete the thumbs a little bit more and guys if you want some more some more news reviews and kick-ass CES 2014 coverage make sure you 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