Valve's Steam Machines Delayed, Won't Be Coming In 2014 134
sfcrazy (1542989) writes "Valve has announced that its Steam Machines won't be available in the market anytime in 2014. The company delayed the release due to ongoing work on the Steam Controller. Valve's Eric Hope explains on Steam Forums why the work on controller is causing the delay: 'We're now using wireless prototype controllers to conduct live playtests, with everyone from industry professionals to die-hard gamers to casual gamers. It's generating a ton of useful feedback, and it means we'll be able to make the controller a lot better. Of course, it's also keeping us pretty busy making all those improvements. Realistically, we're now looking at a release window of 2015, not 2014.'"
Controllers are hard (Score:4, Insightful)
Controllers are hard to get right. This ain't the eighties where you just slapped some buttons on a box and put it in the players' hands. And they want to make a controller whose basic idea is completely daft anyway, because it totally screws up position feedback.
What's really wanted is a game console where all controls can be remapped on all titles. Let's see a console maker have the balls to implement such a feature. THAT would be a revolution in control, not a stupid zero-travel joystick.
Re:One of the classic blunders (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't want to ship early then fix when you're talking about the controller. You want that to be a steady target for developers, not just for big changes like whether you need analogue triggers, but for subtle qualitative ones like the throw of the triggers and buttons, and in this case pretty much everything about the repsonse of those touchpads. How much contact is needed to register a touch? What method do you use to smooth the capacitance data into coordinates? What's the sample rate? Developers will spend lots of time tuning the "feel" of their games to match those parameters, and if you change those a year later, suddenly their game is going to feel subtly wrong, (Anyone who has had to play a console game with a cheap thirdparty pad knows this pain.) The developer will have to live with it or go in and issue some sort of controller-version-specific patch.
Nope, with controllers, doing it right and late is more important than doing it almost right and early.
Thank God for Valve (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank God for Valve. The gaming industry would be terrible if they weren't around. Any other company would have just pushed this out the door and made their quick buck... hell, no other company would have even tried to make an open gaming platform. If Valve ever offers an IPO I'll be first in line. They're one of the few tech companies out there that are actually doing something I'd consider of value.