The Steam Controller was one of those things that sounded like a good idea on paper, but its impracticalities became evident once you got your hands on it. For one, the trackpad in place of the traditional analogue stick sounded like a solution for one of console gaming's biggest drawbacks – the lack of a mouse; but, it just didn't work as intended for third or first-person games. The controller eventually faded away from the gaming ecosystem, but it now appears that Valve may want to bring it back.
During a conversation with The Verge, Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang was asked if the company had any plans to create a new version of the now shelved controller. “Yeah, we want to make it happen,” he said. "It’s just a question of how and when. I think it’s likely that we’ll explore that because it’s something we wanted as well. Right now, we’re focusing on the Deck, so it’s a little bit of the same thing as the microconsole question: it’s definitely something where we’d be excited to work with a third-party or explore ourselves.”
It seemed that Valve had made up for the rather disappointing performance of the Steam Controller via the Steam Deck, but the company evidently wants another shot at creating it, now that it has learnt from its mistakes. Of course, this is in no way a confirmation that the company is working on the Steam Controller 2.0, but it gives hope to the cult following of the controller.
But that's not the only successor that Valve is considering. Elsewhere in the interview, designer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that the next possible iteration of the Steam Deck will make improvements, but won't be a 'Steam Deck Pro'.
"Right now the fact that all the Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one target for users to understand what kind of performance level to expect when you're playing and for developers to understand what to target… there's a lot of value in having that one spec," he said. "I think we'll opt to keep the one performance level for a little bit longer, and only look at changing the performance level when there is a significant gain to be had.
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