You're right, millions :P

btw. another point - all of the AAA games are designed with analog sticks in mind. Touchpads are something different, so the games controls won't really be that good optimised.

Imagine playing Street Fighter with this.

It will be tough but as long as they ship some kind of software or in-built drivers that lets you control the sensitivity, use macros etc.. and with some training I think it could work.

Well they're thrusting it onto the media and in large, pretty pics. I can make a judgment on it.

Hmm... While it looks silly at a first glance, after giving it a closer look, I have to say I like it. Sort of.

If nothing else, you have to give them credit for trying something a little different, instead of yet another rip-off of a rip-off of a rip-off.

Nintendo have always been very innovative about input devices, and while people would joke and complain about them at first, most of them eventually turned out to be very successful. Maybe this Steam gamepad has potential too, but I guess the only way to find out for sure is to actually try one.

I figure either it will fail, and thus will soon be forgotten, or it will actually work out and push game ( and multimedia ) controllers to the next level. Unlike Valve, the gamer doesn't have much to lose in this. I was actually pretty disappointed with the last few generations of controllers. Sony and Microsoft in particular introduced hardly any new features at all.

P.S.: I wanted to add, since it says it supports macros and customisation, wouldn't that potentially give some players an unfair advantage in competitive games? I wonder how that will work out.

lol when i saw the picture i thought of blind mickey mouse, looks very weird gotta see how it functions

Interested in trying it.

Arg.

As a gamepad lover, this could be promising, even if their controller looks like it could be awful. Specially the part where they mention it being compatible with their entire catalog.

On the other hand, if they had means and the people to test their entire catalog, I'd prefer if it were for third-party-DRM-issues and compatibility reasons. Probably harder to deal with and less profitable, but still.

Cross-posting from the other thread.

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That is quite literally the ugliest controller I've seen in ages.

I'm also extremely worried about functionality given the placement of the ABXY buttons.

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I don't think they can assure that it works with everything either but it probably uses a setup that works with whatever the standardized input system is called these days so the only ones I'd be worried about are the ones that specify that they only work with 360 controllers and those that don't work with controllers at all due to not having enough buttons or the buttons having to be set up in an extremely awkward manner.

Then there's the fact that even if it did work, I really wouldn't want to use the controller to play something like Crusader Kings. It'd just be awkward.

Funny thing: that's what this is most designed for, playing mouse focused games on a pad. For something like Assassin's Creed you surely would want to stick to a 360 or similar pad.

Personally, I'm hoping I get to try it out without dropping money... not that it's likely. 300 out of how many people get picked?

Now, I'm generally not a joypad person, instead preferring keyboard and mouse for the most part, but I do want to try this one out before trashing it.

Nice that they have buttons on the bottom - could use more, in fact. Those middle buttons look about as accessible as "start" and "select" - hopefully they won't tend to be mapped for anything you might need to control your character while doing. I like the trackpads. I've been toying with the idea of actually building a controller with trackpads to see if it could improve upon thumbsticks (such clumsy, limited things) but doubt I would never have gotten around to it, so I'm glad someone else did instead :P

That's one of my big concerns. Inevitably, they will be though. They're the ABXY buttons. Same as an Xbox controller. Unless they have more replacement buttons that I'm not seeing.