Sure, its true quality is entirely hypothetical for now, but I’m genuinely excited to see the Steam Controller, one of my most treasured accessories, return.
Yes Valve’s new Steam Machine looks neat, and yes I’ll almost certainly end up mulling over a purchase as my already creaking GPU continues ageing itself into irrelevancy, but – sorry Steam Frame, sorry Switch 2 – it’s certainly not the gaming hardware I’m most excited about this year. Instead – and I realise countless eyebrows are about to shoot up in unison as I say what I’m going to say – the megaton news for me is that a new Steam controller is on the way.
It might be divisive, but I’m on the side that bloody loves the original Steam controller. Sure, its ergonomics are a bit rubbish and its single analogue stick makes it immediately impractical for a lot of games; and yes, it feels a bit cheap and plasticky in a way that never really screamed premium in the same way as the official Xbox controller or PlayStation’s DualSense. But! As a determinedly TV-focused PC player, when that little plastic lump arrived in 2015, it opened up a world of gaming that just wouldn’t have been possible for me otherwise.
For all my dalliances with consoles over the years, I’ve always been a PC gamer at heart. I was fortunate enough to have access to a family PC at the right age, meaning my formative games were as much Thief, Theme Park, Sim City, and Myst as they were Mario and Donkey Kong.
