Steam’s living room hardware blitz gets off to a muddy start

Valve didn’t give itself an easy job when it publicly announced its decision, over two years ago now, to bring the PC gaming experience to the living room TV. Plenty of companies have tried, and most never even got off the ground (see the Infinium Phantom for just one high-profile failure). But Valve is perhaps better positioned for success than any past effort, with a deep understanding of the PC gaming market and a deeply entrenched, market-leading distribution platform in Steam.

Now after a few delays and a soft launch for the OS, Valve is poised to officially launch its run at console gaming. Steam hardware will ship to pre-orderers this week and to others (including select retailers like GameStop) on November 10. It's a multi-pronged effort that includes a lot of moving parts: the SteamOS operating system; the partner-produced "Steam Machine" hardware designed to run that OS out of the box; the Valve-produced Steam Link box that allows for basic in-home streaming; and the Steam Controller meant to make it all controllable from a keyboard-and-mouse-free couch.

We've been putting that entire ecosystem through its paces for a few days now, and while some of those pieces work better than others, all have some trouble living up to the promise of a seamless, hassle-free, PC-on-a-TV-console experience. It's early, and Valve's attack on the living room is far from a vaporware failure, but it's not a shock-and-awe knockout blitz either.

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SteamOS: Familiar in a Big Picture sense

SteamOS itself does a good job of hiding its Linux roots, and we mean that in the best possible way. There are no command lines to struggle with or repos to download or drivers to configure when you first load up a SteamOS system. Instead, Steam’s own front end guides you through a painless setup process that’s not unlike that of the console competition. If you didn’t know any better, you might not even be aware that the Steam Machine is an actual computer with upgradeable hardware, direct access to the file system, and other such PC niceties.

Hacking the system

If you dig deep in the SteamOS menus, you can find a few somewhat-buried shortcuts that let you break out of the Big Picture shell and into the Linux guts of your Steam Machine. Amusingly, pre-built shortcuts like the Linux calculator app immediately crashed to a white screen when we launched them. Trying to launch the Xterm windowing system similarly generated some errors and kicked us out to a basic command line prompt. While utilities like a dictionary and file search tool launched directly, they weren’t compatible with the on-screen keyboard that can be accessed from the Steam Controller (fun fact: we're pretty sure Steam Machines are the first TV-based game consoles to launch with a built-in dictionary utility).

We suppose there are people out there who will want to tinker with the downloads and config files necessary to turn their Steam Machine into a full, TV-based Linux workstation. All in all, though, you’re probably better off getting a vanilla Linux box for that purpose. We'd recommend treating SteamOS as a dumb console that happens to give an inordinate amount of low-level OS access, should you occasionally want or need it.

If you’ve used Steam’s TV-focused Big Picture mode over the last three years, you know exactly how the interface for SteamOS works. If it’s been a while since you launched in Big Picture, though, it’s worth checking out how much a September overhaul has made the whole big-screen experience nicer to look at. Menus are characterized by huge, easy-to-read icons arranged in nice rows and columns, which slide aside as you bring up filtering menus or navigation (one big exception: text on the Controller Configuration screen was a bit small and hard to read at standard TV viewing distances). Everything can be easily navigated with a single analog stick and two buttons to confirm menu selections or go back.

Compared to the sometimes confused interfaces on other consoles, there are a lot of thoughtful design decisions in SteamOS. My favorite little touch is the subtle recommended games that greet you on the main menu and your first Library screen. These don’t just tell you about games you might like to buy (based on your existing library), but they also suggest games that your Steam friends have been playing a lot and backlog titles that you own but haven’t played yet. That's useful information in a world where about 26 percent of purchased Steam games have never been played.

Otherwise, SteamOS gives you everything you would expect from Steam. You can purchase, download, and install games with just a few clicks and then play them from your library with a single button press. There’s a community section that lets you see what your friends are doing on the service and allows you to watch live game broadcasts easily from the comfort of your couch. You can bring up a friends list and chat with them using your voice (assuming you’ve plugged in a USB microphone) or typing.

There’s an obligatory TV Web browser that seems to be built on Chrome and works just fine for what it is. Sites like YouTube and Netflix load and play all right, but anything requiring Flash or a downloadable app didn’t easily cooperate (meaning no easy way to play Spotify music during your SteamOS games).

Some just-out-of-beta kinks

It’s all very smooth, overall, but there were a few sticking points that seemed a little rough compared to other game consoles. While the system hasn’t frozen on us during a game yet, there have been a handful of times where the whole OS hung when we were closing or opening a title, requiring a system reboot that took 30 to 60 seconds. We ran into occasional problems with webpage scrolling, the on-screen keyboard, and Wi-Fi recognition as well, all of which disappeared with a reboot.

We also found a few SteamOS games that still include an intermediate "launcher" screen that asks players to confirm resolution and other settings. That's only an annoyance because these screens can't be navigated with the Steam Controller; you need to plug in a mouse and keyboard to get through to the actual game in these cases. While the SteamOS interface includes large warnings that these games require extra hardware, and Valve isn't directly responsible for third-party developers' unfriendly decisions, it still seems like an oversight to have such games be unplayable out of the box.

We also found it a bit odd that the Library screen defaults to showing every Steam game you own, including games that don't run natively on SteamOS (you need to go through a menu and add a filter to get rid of the excess). While other Library titles can technically be played through in-home streaming (more on that in the Steam Link section below), these titles clog up your Library screen even if you don't have a Windows PC to stream from (and despite a menu option that's supposed to hide them in that case). While the Steam logo button on the Controller can be used to turn off the system, we had to actually get up and press the power button on the box itself to turn it back on (this might not be true of other manufacturers' Steam Machines, for all we know).

None of these issues are unfixable, and we're sure Valve will continue to refine the already competent SteamOS experience going forward. What will be harder to fix are issues of game selection that put the new OS well behind the accumulated momentum of Windows-based gaming.

The 1,500 game launch library

The biggest problem with buying a new game console at launch is finding something good to play. Oh sure, there’s sometimes a must-own system seller in that launch-day lineup and maybe an offbeat gem or two among the other titles being rushed out for a new system’s big debut. But by and large, early adopters are stuck with a paltry selection of titles worth playing for a while after they dive into a new generation.

That isn’t a problem for the launch of SteamOS and its Steam Machines. That’s because Valve has spent nearly two years now laying the groundwork for its new gaming-focused operating system, leveraging its industry ties to get over 1,500 existing Steam games to be SteamOS compatible in time for launch.

The result of all that hard work, if you’re already a PC gamer, is a built-in library of native titles ready for download as soon as you set up your new Steam Machine. Of the 228 games in my Steam library, 82 had SteamOS versions ready to go. Most of those titles were smaller indie games I picked up during bundles or sales, but there were a few big-budget, big-name titles that I was pleasantly surprised had already been ported to SteamOS: Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Dying Light, Spec Ops: The Line, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown among them.

If you’ve never had a gaming PC and are considering the new Steam Machines as a console competitor, the 1,500+ games in the SteamOS library can be seen as a pretty strong launch lineup. They can also be seen as merely a form of warmed-over, limited backward compatibility with a much larger Windows-based PC gaming library. This leads directly to the biggest problem with the SteamOS ecosystem as a whole: it doesn’t offer much of anything over the existing Windows-based gaming world.

Alienware's Steam Machine: Worse without Windows

Valve provided us with an imaginatively named “Alienware Steam Machine” for testing. At first glance, the box is almost completely identical to the Alienware Alpha line. You may remember the Alpha as the Windows-based PC-in-a-console boxes that Alienware released last year after Valve's SteamOS delay left it with ready-to-ship hardware that lacked an operating system. Alienware's Alpha and Steam Machines both fit in the same thin, 8-inch square chassis that resembles a Wii U much more than an Xbox One. The only external difference between the two is a small, light up Steam logo in the cut-out corner on the front of the Steam Machine's case.

Look a little deeper, though, and... well, actually, you'll find Alienware's Steam Machines struggle to compete with the Alpha line in most ways. You’d think the truly free SteamOS would make the Steam Machine a bit cheaper than the Alpha and Windows 10 (which is only mostly free), but by-and large that’s not true. The entry-level i3-processor equipped system for both lines come in at $450 with identical hardware. Stepping up to $550 gets you a bump from 4GB to 8GB of RAM and 500GB to 1TB of hard drive space on both the Steam Machine and the Windows-based Alpha.

Hardware power

We haven’t been able to run independent benchmarks on our Alienware Steam Machine yet, but some quick tests through Shadow of Mordor don’t speak highly of the machine’s raw power. Using the game’s internal benchmarking function, we got average frame rates ranging from 34.85 fps on the “Lowest” graphical setting to 6.58 fps on the “Ultra” setting.

Digital Foundry’s analysis places the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Mordor (which run at a pretty solid 30 frames per second) somewhere between the “Medium” and “High” settings on the PC version, which benchmarked at 28.57 and 24.52 frames per second on our box, respectively. That means $350 console hardware that's pushing two years old runs the game comparably or slightly better than the new, $750 Steam Machine we’re currently testing.

These results reflect just one game, and direct comparisons between console and PC performance are tough. Still, this test doesn't look good for the system's i7 - 4785T Quad Core processor, 8GB of RAM, or custom Nvidia GeForce GTX GPU (which the manufacturer says is comparable to an 860M-class card).

At the top end, the $750 i7-powered Steam Machine we tested is $50 cheaper than the $800 top-end Alpha, which has the same processor, GPU, and RAM. But the hard drive on that Steam Machine is actually 1 TB smaller than the comparable Alpha, which makes the small difference in price somewhat moot. It’s only at one level down that the $650 i5-based Steam Machine truly matches the $700 Alienware Alpha on specs at a lower price. Otherwise, the main hardware difference between the two lines seems to be that one comes with a Steam Controller and SteamOS, and the other comes with an Xbox 360 controller and Windows 10.

Alienware is only one manufacturer, and other Steam Machine partners may well create SteamOS boxes that are a better value than their Windows-based counterparts. Any savings in going with Steam Machine hardware, though, come at the significant cost of not being able to play thousands of Windows-only games, both on and off Steam, as you can on machines like the Alpha.

SteamOS’ 1,500+ game library might sound impressive for a console launch, but it’s nothing compared to the 6,600+ Windows-based games on Steam alone. And so far, there isn’t a single title that’s exclusively available on SteamOS to act as a potential “system seller;” every single Steam Machine game is also playable on a Windows machine. And if you're looking to play big name PC launches this holiday season, everything from Star Wars Battlefront to Fallout 4 to Just Cause 3 will be launching on Windows first, with little to no indication of any SteamOS ports being planned.

Back in 2012, Valve’s Gabe Newell very publicly called Windows 8 gaming a “catastrophe." Over three years since those comments, gaming on Windows 10 doesn’t seem nearly so catastrophic for the end user. That’s thanks in part to some PC-refocusing moves on Microsoft's part, but it’s also in large part because Steam has been making Windows gaming perfectly pleasant for over a decade now. SteamOS is perfectly functional, but unless you have a philosophical objection to supporting a closed-source Microsoft OS, a Steam-equipped Windows machine currently seems strictly better for gaming.

Steam Link: A wonky, wireless HDMI extension cord

Let’s say you don’t want to buy an entirely new gaming computer, nor haul your current gaming rig away from its cozy spot at a keyboard-and-mouse-equipped desk, but you do want to play a few more PC games in the living room or wherever you’ve placed your biggest TV set. The Steam Link has been made specifically for you—so long as you can stomach its connectivity caveats.

When we first heard about Steam Link, we were excited by the promise of clean, efficient, wireless streaming of our favorite PC games from a Windows computer to any TV in our house. Many people we know have both their gaming computers and wireless routers placed far from their primary TV sets, so the idea of a $50 box that simplifies such local streaming—and offers a few USB ports for the sake of extra controllers and couch-multiplayer PC gaming in the new room—sounded mighty appealing.

On the day we popped into Valve’s Bellevue headquarters to pick up a review Link, however, we received warnings from no less than three staffers that we should opt for a wired Internet connection for our home Link tests, not wireless. Valve didn’t sugarcoat it: their box wasn’t equipped with an antenna array or a wireless chip that would somehow fix existing connectivity issues in an average home or apartment complex, let alone issues with latency and button-tap delays.

Given this, it’s a bit odd that the Steam Link doesn’t come with an Ethernet cable long enough to stretch from most users’ routers to their TV sets. In fact, the Link’s included five-foot cable seems more insulting than useful. Unless you have a handy Ethernet drop right by your HDTV, be prepared to run some longer cabling to get things working.

To get started, plug the Link into a wall and a TV or monitor’s open HDMI port, and you’ll soon see a startup screen that asks users to plug a mouse-and-keyboard, a gamepad, or a Steam Controller dongle into one of the Link’s open USB slots. (This dongle is necessary to use the Steam Controller, so don’t expect to free up a USB slot by buying into the Steam ecosystem). Do so, and you’ll be encouraged to connect your Steam Link directly to a router (though it won’t stop you from taking the wireless route and typing in your WPA2 credentials).

The Link will then show a list of computers on your network that a) are running Steam and b) have enabled Steam home sharing in that computer’s options menus; pick one of those, and you’ll take over control of that PC. (Sorry, OS X and Linux users; your version of Steam can't be used to host streaming games yet).

We only tested the Steam Link on one home PC system—an i7-4770K PC with 8GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 760—connected to a Linksys WRT 1900AC router. That’s no slouch of a rig, yet at first, we found ourselves defaulted to a streaming-video resolution of 1536x864, which was an automatic downsampling of our PC’s native 1920x1080. No matter how many settings we toggled—particularly the vague quality options of “fast,” “balanced,” and “beautiful”— we couldn’t get the resolution to budge any higher. The sticking point, it seems, was Windows’ “size of text” setting on the streaming PC, which had been set at 125 percent. Putting that back to 100 percent got our Link image back to a 1080p resolution.

The stream looked great with still images, but what about fast-paced games? To measure game performance, we focused on twitchy, Sonic-inspired indie game Action Henk. It requires a mix of jump, slide, and turnaround maneuvers to maximize speed on a series of ramps and curved surfaces, so doing well in the game hinges on very precise controls. We found that button-tap latency, even with both our Link and our host PC connected wirelessly, was essentially nil. This proved true when the hardware was separated by as far away as 30 feet through a significant set of walls.

A meandering stream

Performance was admittedly a little smoother when both pieces of hardware were wired, but not to such a degree that we felt compelled in our use case to keep things wired at all times (though our 5GHz network certainly helped). More importantly, visual quality for both wireless and wired connections wasn’t 1:1. Even still images suffered from a bit of artifacting and pixelization, but that visual issue became more glaring in higher-speed scenes. In tests of soccer-with-cars title Rocket League, we noticed some juddering as the image refreshed when we sharply steered our cars in any direction. It’s as if the Steam Link’s decoder wasn’t built to handle entire scenes shifting horizontally so quickly.

The main performance issue we faced, even when all devices were wired, was that the signal crapped out entirely for spans of time ranging from a third of a second to a whopping four seconds. The longest blackout was followed by Windows warnings that our Nvidia driver had crashed and needed to restart. We have no idea whether those crashes were specifically due to our video card picking up so much extra encoding slack, but if so, we hope Nvidia responds with drivers that are more mindful of such encoding demands.

What’s more, a number of games simply didn’t work on the Link. Towerfall, Nidhogg, and Skullgirls served a variety of nonreactive screens (including a scary green screen of death) to the Link while they still functioned on the PC in the other room. Games like Grand Theft Auto V and Borderlands 2 gave us trouble thanks to pre-game, Windows-style menus that the Link didn’t render nearly as neatly as our Windows machine did. The weirdest error we encountered was when Super Meat Boy began running its every animation as quickly as possible, even though the in-game timer, sounds, and other elements ran at normal speed; switching the Link off and playing SMB on our gaming PC afterward didn’t replicate the issue.

Another quirk: we’re still not exactly sure what the proper power-on, power-off procedure is. We could choose a menu option to power the Steam Link off, or we could walk off with no games running and find it had turned itself off hours later. Either way, if we wanted to turn the Steam Link back on, holding down a controller button often didn’t do the trick. Since the Steam Link doesn’t have a power button on the box itself, we had to do a full power cycle almost every time it appeared to be turned off.

We’re happy that latency appears to have gotten the most attention in the Link world, but a lot of other stream-to-my-TV issues have yet to be resolved in time for the hardware's launch. Crashing games, major stutters, and power-on questions aren’t going to cut it for anybody who might depend on this as a central hub for a long night of multiplayer gaming. And while our particular wireless performance was so impressive that we could comfortably play twitchy games like Action Henk and Rocket League, Valve’s official, repeated recommendations about making the wired choice make us anxious to recommend this as a wireless solution—especially if your apartment complex or gizmo-filled home is already rife with connectivity issues.

Taking control, remaking control

While you can use standard PC keyboards and mice with a Steam Machine, not everyone’s going to be comfortable balancing those PC standards on their lap from the living room couch. Thus, the Steam Controller, a handheld pad tasked with the unenviable goal of working seamlessly with thousands of PC games designed for a very different use case. That controller does as good a job as can be expected with that heavy lift but still runs into its fair share of problems.

Ergonomically, the Steam Controller differentiates itself quite noticeably from other control pads thanks to some truly bulbous palm grips that extend down from the buttons. While practically every console controller since the original PlayStation has had grips that curve away from the palms in a smooth, concave sweep, the Steam Controller’s grips bulge up almost obscenely, filling up your palms and leaving little wiggle room.

Steam Controller, minus the Steam

Despite the name, the Steam Controller works decently well on non-Steam Windows apps. Plug it in to a Windows PC using a USB cord (or the included USB dongle), and the OS will recognize it and install the appropriate drivers automatically. As long as Steam is open, you’ll even get basic control over mouse and keyboard functions, too. The right touchpad is used as a virtual trackball, the shoulder buttons as left and right clicks, the analog pad enters arrow key inputs, etc.

If there’s a way to customize this mapping outside of a Steam game, we have yet to find it. Even as it stands, though, the basic controller is functional enough to drag and drop through a game of Hearthstone and perform basic functions in plenty of other non-Steam games, if you’re so inclined.

On the plus side, these expanded grips naturally raise your thumbs up a bit higher above the two circular, concave touch pads that are the Steam Controller’s other main distinguishing feature. That positioning makes it easy to glide along the touchpads with the tip of your thumbs (rather than the fatter pad on the underside of the thumb). It also makes it easy to extend your thumb at the knuckle for increased reach and precision on those touchpads.

But the bulbous grips seem to get in the way if you’re using the Controller for practically anything else. Pushing the front shoulder buttons on the top of the controller is a little uncomfortable and unnatural feeling, because those fat grips tilt your index finger’s natural position farther to the rear of the controller. And when you reach your thumb towards the analog stick or the face buttons near the bottom of the controller, those rounded grips poke awkwardly into the lower muscles of the thumb.

Those face buttons have ergonomic problems of their own. The four face buttons are noticeably smaller and packed closer together than those on other console controllers, a concession to the healthy size of that second touchpad. The buttons themselves are suitably springy and responsive enough, but the cramped layout is a bit awkward for adult-sized hands, and it made us want to revert to an Xbox controller for games built for face buttons. All in all, the face buttons feel like an afterthought, which may be appropriate, considering they didn’t even exist on early Steam Controller prototypes shown publicly.

Despite these issues, the Steam Controller has one key advantage over pretty much every handheld controller that came before it: two rear “grip” buttons on the inside edge of the back of the controller. These grip buttons are beautifully constructed, placed in a comfortable position that’s pretty much always accessible to at least two fingers, with a slight raised gap over the actual controller grip that lets you easily feel their position. There’s enough springy resistance that it’s tough to press these grip buttons accidentally, and a satisfying clickiness when you do intend to press them.

After a few days of use, these new buttons seem like an obvious addition to the now-standard shoulder buttons. Microsoft is already aping this design choice with rear buttons on its Xbox Elite controller, and we can only hope more controller makers do the same in the future.

The controller with 1,000 faces

Valve has done an admirable job of letting users customize the Steam Controller in software to tailor it to specific games. Everything from the function of each button to the angle of the horizontal axis on the touchpads to the length of the spin on the virtual “trackball” effect to the “refresh rate” of a held button can be tweaked in settings.

It’s a degree of customization that’s necessary to account for the dizzying array of options offered by modern PC games, but it can get a little overwhelming. SteamOS offers a few presets that are generally applicable for the bulk of games (gamepad, mouse/keyboard, and a hybrid that allows for mouse-controls), but we found most games needed a bit of manual tweaking to map some function or another (or adjust the touchpad sensitivity).

SteamOS does allow for users to easily share their own game-specific controller configurations to help players avoid this manual step. We look forward to testing that feature once there are more Steam Controllers out in the wild.

After all that customization, here’s how using the Steam Controller affected our experience with some of the most common PC gaming use cases:

Where are my keys

PC gamers seem to revel in the fact that a standard keyboard has so many keys that even the most complex games can have every single in-game function assigned to a single key. The Steam Controller might not match this input variety, but it comes close enough for most any use.

By my count, you can assign functions to 20 different button-like inputs on the Steam Controller: four face buttons, six shoulder buttons (including the extra “click” at the bottom of both triggers), two rear grips, four directional inputs on the left touchpad, a tangible “click” on both the analog stick and the right touchpad, and the back and forward buttons. You could theoretically up this to 34 different inputs by setting aside one button as a “mode modifier” that gives an entirely new set of input instructions when held down.

Yes, that’s still less than the 100+ inputs that keyboard players usually have access to. But if you’re playing a game that needs literally every key on the keyboard, you probably don’t want to be playing it from the couch anyway, we’d wager.

First Person Shooters

If you can’t have a keyboard and mouse, the Steam Controller might just be the next best thing in this important genre. The addition of those two extra grip buttons is a godsend in games where you never want your thumbs moving off the movement/looking controls. We ended up assigning crouching and reloading to the rear grips for easy access, but you could map jumping, sprinting, grenades, flashlights, or any number of crucial options, should you choose.

More importantly, the right touchpad provides a great balance between turning speed and precision aiming, compared with a standard analog stick (the left analog stick, on the other hand, is just fine for basic movement). After a bit of fiddling with the sensitivity settings (both in-game and in the SteamOS interface) we found a comfort spot that allowed for nearly instantaneous 90 degree turns (using a quick swipe across the touchpad) and finely tuned aiming adjustments when staring down the gunsights (by maintaining contact and making slight thumb movements).

The large surface area of the touchpad provides plenty of space for this kind of precise aiming tweaks, and the whole process is much easier without the springy resistance of an analog stick getting in the way. For shooting from the couch, it’s going to be hard to go back to a dual analog stick at this point.

Mouse-controlled games

Anyone who’s used a touchpad on a laptop knows that the input is generally an adequate but imperfect replacement for a mouse. Similarly, for games where an on-screen mouse pointer is your main mode of interaction with the game world, the Steam Controller can be an adequate substitute… as long as reaction time isn’t a big issue.

SteamOS offers a number of options for translating the movement of your thumb into mouse input. We especially liked trackball mode, which gives the mouse pointer some leftover momentum after a swipe across the touchpad surface (with a satisfying, rhythmic haptic click as the virtual trackball whirs to a stop). This mode makes it easy to whip the pointer from one end of the screen to another, while generally maintaining good enough precision when you keep your thumb in contact with the pad.

That’s fine for turn-based titles and puzzle games that don’t have a timing component. But we found the trackpad a bit awkward to use in games like Torchlight II, where precision clicking has to be matched with speed. No matter how we played with the settings, the pointer control always felt a little too loose (requiring additional time to reach a specific click target) or too tight (requiring too much swiping to get across the entire screen quickly). Hitting moving targets with the touchpad-controlled mouse pointer is definitely possible, but just difficult enough to have us pining for the easy glide of a mouse.

We’ve only been using the Steam Controller for a few days, so it’s possible that more practice (and more playing with the player-activated “mode switch” sensitivity toggles) could eventually make this feel more natural. Still, we tend to think thumbpad pointing will remain either precise or quick, but not both.

"Digital" games

First off, give up your hope of using the Steam Controller for precise digital input in fighting games or platformers. The left touchpad can be used to emulate this kind of directional input (and there’s even a faint cross indentation on the pad to suggest such a use), but in practice it’s nigh unusable for this purpose.

The pad provides too much room for thumb movement between one direction and another, and pressing down on the touchpad requires too much force (and requires a bit too much downward “action”) for games that require quick response times. You can set up the touchpad to give directional input without a forcible “click,” but the lack of a strong, tangible d-pad under your thumb still makes it tough to know what you’re doing.

The analog stick serves as a fine substitute for movement in most games, but we missed the digital cross on our Xbox One controller for games that need precise directional inputs. And as we mentioned above, the face buttons feel like a small, cramped afterthought compared to the alternatives from Xbox and PlayStation. It’s not unusable, but it’s less comfortable than the alternative.

Dual-analog games

By far the worst use case for the Steam Controller is games designed with a dual-stick controller in mind. The right touchpad can be used to fill in for the second analog stick in these cases, but it’s less than ideal. Having no easy, tangible idea of where my thumb was on the pad (and no forcible spring resistance to guide me) makes aiming in a game like Hotline Miami 2 and moving the camera in a game like Shadow of Mordor exceedingly awkward. For these kinds of games, a standard control pad with an actual second analog stick is practically a must.