Valve removes touchscreen from Steam Controller, replaces it with regular buttons

Valve’s Steam Machine and its paired Steam Controller are still in early beta, so we should expect both small and drastic changes to various aspects of both devices. When the Steam Controller was revealed, it was announced that a small touchscreen would be placed in the center of the pad, making it somewhat like a miniature version of the Wii U tablet. Now, Valve has decided to nix the idea of the touchscreen altogether, and replace it with regular, physical buttons.

The current beta Steam Controller has a square placed in the center of the gamepad that is separated into four equal quadrants, each of which are individual physical buttons. It’s supposed to simulate a touchscreen, in that you can simultaneously tap the square in four different locations as separate input. Now, that placeholder button-screen is going to be replaced by standard controls — namely, a D-pad and A, B, X, and Y face buttons. If you bought into Valve’s hype that the Steam Controller would be a revolution that would somehow make controlling PC games with a gamepad tolerable, you might want to scale that back. It appears that the only “revolutionary” aspects of the Steam Controller now are the owl-eye touchpads that replace standard analog sticks, and from what we’ve seen of them so far, they’re not going to revolutionize much.

At the Steam Dev Days conference, Valve showed off a 3D-printed prototype of the new controller — seen above — and a render of the controller, seen below.