Valve wanted to compete with consoles. Consoles go in the living room and are played with a controller. Your home's PC is not in the living room, so how does Valve fix that? The Steam Link. Okay, but PC games are frequently designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard. There's lots of stuff to click on. So how do you play that from the couch without some elaborate lap pad with a mouse and keyboard on it? The Valve Controller. I see how it could very well have worked. Consoles are expensive, and if you already have a PC, it's an awfully cheap way to play games with better graphics for less money.

It really is a great controller. The omission of the d-pad was a mistake, but the real reason it failed was because people already had a preference for the X-Box controller. Most games worked with the X-Box controller with no extra configuration.

This is why I think the Deck has done it right: include all the standard buttons plus the extra stuff.

>So how do you play that from the couch without some elaborate lap pad with a mouse and keyboard on it? The Valve Controller. I see how it could very well have worked.

I guess maybe in a world where every console controller isn't compatible with most PC games, cheaper than the valve controller and more ergonomically designed than the valve controller...maybe if Logitech, 8bitdo, Razer etc. didn't exist and didn't produce cheaper or better controllers it could have worked....

Most first person shooter PC games, sure, but there are thousands of PC games that assume you have a mouse and a keyboard. Point and click adventures, that sort of thing.

Yeah i know. Playing an RTS or a Moba game or something with a controller would be a nightmare. Most 4x games like Civilization would suck a lot. Games like Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm or pretty much any non mobile roguelike would be unfeasible to play with a controller.

Even some games you'd think should work well with a controller don't really. Unepic's a 2d side scrolling action-adventure game, you'd think it'd be controller friendly, and there are console ports of it, but the PC version uses 10 hotkeys for various spells and abilities. I managed to map i think 4 or 5 of them to controller buttons, but it meant more going through the game menu and reassigning spells than it would have using a keyboard.