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#steam#controller#valve#games#don#more#windows#hardware#game#steamos
Discussion (205 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> 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
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.
Another POV is, nobody on HN has any idea what he's talking about, it's all vibes.
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
Are they compliant in the Australian market now?
ASML, Berkshire Hathaway, Novo Nordisk, TSMC, Saab, Atlas Copco, Texas Instruments.
(Perhaps not that many from the US though, relatively speaking.)
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.
The "played for less than two hours" refund policy is more of a compromise than great, IMHO.
It works well for games that are quick to run and enjoy. However, quite a few of the games I've played will easily burn two hours on loading, compiling shaders, watching unskippable branding animations (splash screens), tuning graphics settings, setting up key bindings, and working past miscellaneous bugs.
Steam's "play time" clock starts when the game executable is launched, and keeps running during all of that nonsense, even at title screens and menus. Some games have run past Valve's return window before I got even a minute of play time.
It would be nice if one of Steam's widely used APIs (Steamworks?) included a way for a game to register when it is actually being played, as opposed to loading or setting up or sitting at a pause screen. I think this would help with the return window problem, and finally make the played hours count on our Steam profiles somewhat accurate.
At least personally, I'd prefer having to wait a few months and having a good refund policy over more sales
Everybody else could stand to take lessons from them
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.
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.
Not sure what you mean by "not great," the Steam Deck is awesome. The one in our household is like 3 years old and still sees daily use. They have been very well received by the PC gaming community.
SteamOS is mostly just the regular Steam client on top of Linux. You will get more or less the same overall experience by starting with a reasonably capable GPU, then installing any mainstream Linux distro, then installing the Steam client, and making a few tweaks. Valve has been very active in upstreaming fixes and features to upstream projects like the Linux kernel and Wine, so the Steam Deck (and soon Steam Machine) doesn't actually have any special sauce, it's just a nice self-contained unit for those who just want to play games and not be bothered by the OS under the hood.
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.
Likely to change soon though with the steam machine release
Can only hope that Stop Killing Games is the first shell in winning back our digital rights
The gambling thing is whack but at least it's not polymarket.
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. This controller brings that same convenience to Windows too.
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.
PS4 controller support on Windows used to be a huge hassle, because you had to install DS4Windows to make it work. Nowadays, Windows automatically downloads the proprietary drivers to make it work, but I'm not sure if that covers the PS4 controller-specific features such as the touchpad, gyroscope, lightbar or if it enables XInput support. I think the PS4 controller situation supports what OP above is claiming.
That's exactly how you create a walled garden. You build a garden. Get people in. Then wall it up.
If all the games respected HID and Valve did something proprietary, I would understand the skepticism. The truth is that most games are engineered with platform integration (e.g. for achievements, controller mapping, etc.), and fallback to the Xbox API. It's reasonable for Valve to sell a controller that takes full advantage of their platform.
Also, Valve's primary OS is Linux-based. There's surely either already a module upstream in the kernel or one is coming soon. That is: open source software to take full advantage of this controller. That's not the same thing as a walled garden.
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.
So it’s the controller and not Windows then, if partial functionality is okay (which seems fine to me).
I don't have any reason to believe that similar projects won't work for the new version.
This review says otherwise:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/the-new-steam-controll...
> Using The Steam Controller Completely Outside Of Steam
> [...] However, at least on the newly released Fedora KDE 44, the system does appear to detect it as a basic gamepad out of the box.
> [...] I installed LIMBO from GOG with GE-Proton and it worked great even with vibration.
More example games are described there as well. A few apparently get confused by the Steam Controller presenting itself as a game controller, a keyboard, and a mouse, but most seem to be fine.
Those tests were done on Linux. I wonder if it's any different on Windows.
on Linux I think there's a kernel level driver, but I'm not sure
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 was very curious about this, No video I saw even said anything about the Steam Software being needed, and is extremely disappointing, on my computer I make a point that I only have steam running if I am playing a steam game. If I am not it is not running and it does not auto start.
Now if it works with steam closed, I am slightly more ok with it but I would love a driver that is not coupled with Steam.
Though I do think it aligns with Valve’s initiatives lately. I don’t think I would go so far as to say walled garden but SteamOS is clearly geared towards using the Steam Store for everything (sure it has desktop mode, but the focus is clear) and their half assed Windows support (despite promises) on the Steam Deck.
Don’t get me wrong, Valve has done a lot of good but I do worry at how quick we are to defend them. I mean I even see people defending their rumored use of AI saying things like “well if there is any company I would trust it would be Valve”. Yeah that won’t backfire.
Edit:
Wait, it won’t even work with a game if it isn’t launched through steam? Are the other comments correct? If that is true, Yeah that is a big nope for me and of course more are not talking about it.
I refuse to let steam or any software run that is not related to my current task.
Why do we criticize Razer for shady practices with their hardware and software but it is fine that Valve did this?
Valve does deserve criticism for the royal pain certain things are though. For example non-technical users will absolutely struggle to get Proton working without Steam, the process in doing so is purposefully kept undocumented and esoteric. There's 100% a little bit of undesirable obfuscation Valve does to push you towards just using Steam to run their OSS. It's definitely non-Free in the purist sense.
In practice half-assed HID drivers by OS, badly designed OS<->application APIs, hardware manufacturers copy pasting HID descriptors from other devices, not following the standard properly, firmware bugs getting fixed with drivers instead of firmware fixes, intentional discrepancies from standard, console manufacturers reinventing the wheel has lead to the current mess.
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
SteamOS is technically licensed under GPL, but Valve has yet to release the source code for 3.0 (4 years ago...)
The last activity in the kernel repository was 9 years ago.
That's not true. You get a reduced functionality controller with trackpads that can still be used to start steam back up.
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.
Regular controllers are good for people with the default number of arms, legs and fingers. But if you have some kind of disability, it's often pretty unique.
Regular game/computer controllers for disabled folks were pretty pricey last time I've checked.
AFAIK, 3d printing is not that expensive. Many places have hacker spaces or just people who print for almost free.
So I guess it's a huge win for people who need accommodations. I'm very happy for that!
I'm not disabled myself, it was just the first thought I had when I've read the news.
Glad to see that valve is using the best CAD software :)
Just because it was withdrawn in 2005 does not exclude its wide use in industry
And the latest!
https://steamcommunity.com/games/353370/announcements/detail...
I know multiple people whom are quite attached to 10+ year old mice that haven't been manufactured for quite some time, and would like to keep the familiar shape and design.
1: https://www.youtube.com/@BenHeckHacks/streams
Every discussion about Ticketmaster and/or scalpers is full of people who think if it wasn't for scalpers and ticketmaster, we could all go to every concert we want to for a reasonable price.
It is the same thing with the tech community and the price of hard drives, RAM, and GPUs right now. I have seen so many comments by people saying they "aren't going to support the price gouging" and seem to think manufacturers are just taking advantage of the hype to increase their prices.
I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't do that.
EDIT: I see others here mention 2 max. Haven't heard that before, but that makes more sense to me.
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.
Me, I don't think so. I just think people really wanted to get one.
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.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 wouldn't let you sell it no
Dont care about controller, memory card or deck charger or whatever other irrelevant addition to existing products you have. I just want an update on the Frame. And yesterday too. Thank you for very much for your time and attention. Until our eyes meet again.