Fair enough. I liked that the maps felt lived in and connected, so exploration was actually more compelling for me in Sunshine, and I tend to lean away from darker games in general. Different tastes.

I loved Sunshine and only learned later it was one of the more divisive 3D Mario games. What didn’t you like about it?

Yeah, it really sucks, because LLM tech itself is amazing. Quantifying language and ideas into what’s basically a massive queryable concept map is a huge achievement. What do the tech giants decide to do with that achievement? Shove it every little place it doesn’t belong making everyone hate it.

Oh well, I’ll keep backing up the interesting local open-source models people make and playing with them in the corner.

I think LLMs are an interesting technology. Of course, the output is inherently untrustworthy, and that rules out a ton of applications tech bros are trying to cram it into.

Possibly, but the AI they’ve got doing it is just bad. Even liking an innocuous comment like “you’re killing it, dude” is apparently enough to get banned.

I say there’s no reason to be hostile to someone still on Reddit. I check here first for most things, but there are many communities whose presence here is either anemic or nonexistent.

Then again, Reddit has always been a desktop first experience for me. I pretty much only use old.reddit.com, and my line in the sand will probably be when it dies.

Oh, I didn’t think of that. If Valve did something like subtracting Machine wishlists from Controller wishlists to estimate the number of people wanting to buy the Controller to use by itself, that leaves a lot of room for underestimating the overlap. I probably contributed to this too by wishlisting the Machine despite not being sure I actually want it. If you only wishlisted the Controller, I may have taken your spot. Oops. Sorry, guys.

Yep, it’s a complete mess to try to predict. Despite both the Frame and Machine being in my wishlist and expected to come in around the same general price, I’m buying the Frame day one while the Machine may stay on hold indefinitely. I’ve been all in on VR since the Vive, but I’ve got better PCs than the Machine already, so my interest in it is more just for its novelty. Nothing about my wishlist status tells Valve any of that though.

I said it somewhere else, but I think Valve actually did factor in wishlist counts. The problem is in the percentage of those that convert to sales. For games, the median conversion rate is 10% to 20% of wishlists converting to sales within the first week. I expect the Steam Controller’s conversion rate was much higher.

Valve may have even tried anticipating this from Deck sales and still failed to account for the Deck conversion rate still being lower due to the greater price.

Even having high-end enthusiast hardware, I want those devices as the baseline too. Whatever optimizations they do still apply over the whole hardware spectrum.

Also, you can technically say 2030 is less than 4 years away if you want to traumatize old people. Lol.

Yeah, I’m gonna be on the look out for people doing this. Gamers Nexus showed the battery voltage as 3.85V. I was worried at the time that this voltage isn’t too common, but it seems that fear is unfounded. Never had a PSP, so that’s cool to know.

I watched both of his videos already. When I said I want this controller to last a while, I mean literal decades. I know iFixit will have replacement parts, but there’s still going to be a point where even they will stop carrying them.

Ah, I guess people are working off different definitions of “running outside Steam.” After looking into it, the lack of DirectInput support is indeed not great. It doesn’t affect my use cases, and the first Steam Controller got open source drivers pretty early, so I doubt it’ll actually be a blocker soon after release, but I’ll refrain from commenting on it until more happens.

You don’t have to add them as non-Steam games. You just have to make sure your desktop profile is set up to match how you want those games to be played. You can save templates and swap them out for a bit easier flexibility.

I have my original Steam Controller set up to swap between a mouse and keyboard mode and an Xbox layout and that works for the majority of things I want to do outside of Steam with it, no fiddling with the “add a non-Steam game” stuff.

Would you pay the same price for a Microsoft controller if it had little pads?

If it had all the other little things like TMR sticks, repair-friendly construction, really deep configuration, and other hardware in the family having a track record of good software support, unironically yes. As much as I hate Microsoft, their accessibility controller was a big win.

Also, it’s not simping to genuinely like a company’s products after using a lot of them.

It’ll work outside Steam using whatever controls you have set up for its desktop profile, which can be the stock Xbox layout, and I plan to play a few games that way, but yes, the controller does require Steam Input to shine.

I think “most of them seem disappointed” doesn’t really capture the overall sentiment, but definitely check some video reviews and decide for yourself.

The touchpads are indeed slightly larger at 34.5mm versus the Deck’s 32.5mm. The whole grip angle and triangle of buttons-sticks-pads is rotated from the Steam Deck slightly because your hands will be closer together, so the angle from your shoulders changes. One review mentioned that they wished Valve had actually gone a bit more extreme with the angle, but that didn’t seem to be a common opinion.

Build quality is debatable, but I thought the ergonomics were great. What didn’t you like about them?

Yes, there are several premium controllers in the $200 range. People unhappy with the price are thinking of the SC as an expensive base model controller when feature-wise it’s more like an inexpensive premium one.