Six months after Valve tantalisingly unveiled its future hardware plans, one of them has successfully escaped the vortex caused by the mounting RAM crisis. Valve has announced its new Steam Controller – the successor to its long-discontinued 2015 effort – goes on sale 4th May.
Buoyed on by the success of its Steam Deck handheld, Valve made a trio of hardware announcements in November last year. The biggies were a Steam Machine mini PC – said to be more than six times as powerful as the Steam Deck – alongside a new standalone VR headset known as the Steam Frame. But as exciting as those announcements were, it was the news of a brand-new Steam Controller that – as a huge fan of the somewhat unfairly maligned original – had me all a-swoon.
All three bits of new hardware were originally targeting a release at the start of this year, but in February, Valve was forced to revise its plans due to global memory and storage shortages caused by massive demand from tech giants going all-in on AI data centres. At the time, it said it was now aiming to launch its hardware before the middle of 2026, and three months on, the Steam Controller is almost ready for release.
As Valve designer Lawrence Yang explained to me last week, the fact the new Steam Controller contains neither RAM nor storage meant it’s escaped the problems facing the company’s other hardware. “And so we’re announcing and shipping it now because this is when it’s ready,” he noted. “We didn’t artificially hold it back for whatever reason. This is just how long it’s taken to get everything ready from a hardware, firmware, software standpoint, as well as building up enough launch quantity and getting it to all of the warehouses around the world so that we can have a good launch quantity on ship day.”
Valve’s Steam Controller revival has been in the works since the launch of Steam Deck OLED and was, according to Valve engineer Jeremy Slocum, borne from the team’s work on the company’s handheld. “As we were developing the Steam deck, a lot of the prototypes we built were very much controller like, but in a handheld form factor, that’s the way we dialed in the ergonomics… And even then, we had inklings [that these] set of inputs and this kind of layout could actually make a pretty good controller design. [The controller] was always in our mind, even as we were developing the Steam Deck.”
And as Steam Deck found its footing, the team “saw that people would dock [the device] and then, if they wanted to play from their couch, those inputs and those configurations that they created for their Steam deck just didn’t translate” to any other controller. “It was kind of a hole in the experience that we felt like we wanted to provide”, continues Slocum.
The team remains “really proud” of the original Steam Controller and how well it allowed people to play games that weren’t designed for a gamepad. But Slocum acknowledges it “fell short just because it didn’t have all the inputs that [some games expected], meaning players had to relearn how to use the controller which “wasn’t ideal for a lot of people.” And so the goal this time around was to “do all these things that are on a traditional game pad as well as all these advanced inputs and make them usable for people” in a more “pick up and play” form. “And then when you want to try and dip your toes in some of those advanced inputs, they’re still really accessible to you.”
And thus, the new Steam Controller – with, perhaps most notably, its second thumbstick and Steam Deck-style layout – which will be available to “add to cart” via Steam on 4th May. It costs £85 here in the UK. Over in Europe, that equates to €99, with Valve also confirming a $99 price tag in the US, $149 in Canada, $149 in Australia, and 419 złoty in Poland. The company notes that pricing variations by region are due to distribution costs, import duties/tariffs, and market conditions.
If you’re wondering about the technical specifics, you can check out Will Judd’s original chat with Valve from last year. And if you’re wondering if it’s worth the £85 price tag, you’ll find my impressions after a week with the Steam Controller elsewhere on Eurogamer.
