Comment on The Steam controller was ahead of its time
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day agoWith respect, this doesn’t make any sense. If you want a joystick controller, just buy an Xbox controller that everything’s compatible with anyway?
The trackpads shine when one needs to emulate a mouse/kb, a nightmare with joysticks.
gmtom@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah thats kind of the point. It doesnt have 2 joysticks so I just buy an Xbox one instead. So it cant compete with the gold standard of crontrollers.
And you can say it has pursose in non controller games but its still worse than a traditional keyboard and mouse in that repect as well as a keyboard with an integrated trackpack.
So theres maybe a small niche of playing non controller games in situations where you dont have a desk and you dont want to use an integrated keyboard, where it does a bit better than the competition. Any other situation you have better options. Which IMO if its worse in most use cases and only a bit better than the competetion in designed niche, then its not really a good product.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Not everyone’s a big kb/mouse fan. My sister refuses to use one on the HTPC.
Hence I think that was its non-insignificant niche; couch usage. Portable keyboards are really awkward and clunky on laps, and if its a trackpad anyway the steam controller is way better.
Personally I think it was a smart business decision, because of this:
No one’s going to buy a steam-branded Xbox controller, but making it different does. And I think what killed it is that it wasn’t plug-and-play enough, eg it didn’t work out of the box with many games.