Valve has announced it will be introducing a redesign for the Steam Controller, ditching the touchscreen in favour of physical buttons.
Although you can’t actually buy a Steam Controller yet, that hasn’t stopped Valve from making some design tweaks before launch.
The redesign was announced during a Valve Steam Dev Days presentation in Seattle and aims to improve backwards compatibility.
When the Steam Controller was originally announced, the SteamOS controller had a touchscreen that Valve stated “allows an infinite number of discrete actions to be made available to the player, without requiring an infinite number of physical buttons.”
However, it seems Valve has now changed its mind and is ditching the touchscreen for a square of four larger buttons in the centre of the controller that can be remapped by the gamer.
The Dev Days attendees were presented with a non-final controller among their rewards at the end of the presentation, and it was identical to the Steam Controller we got our mitts on CES 2014, which also lacked the touchscreen.
The Steam Controller will be powered by two AA batteries, but you will able to use rechargeable batteries.
According to the Steam Database blog, Valve also revealed other Steam Controller details like that they contain gyroscopes that are not yet implemented in the firmware and Valve is keeping VR in mind while developing the controller.
A special group of 300 beta testers will also give Valve their feedback, which will directly influence future changes to the Steam Controller.
Read more: SteamOS Guide – Steam OS and Steam Machines explained