Steam Controller: Revolutionary?

This has definitely been the week of Steam, with Valve making three big announcements. Steam Machines have been announced, and also the operating system called SteamOS. The third and last thing that Valve has announced is their own controller, the Steam Controller. If you give it a quick glimpse it might look like an ordinary controller, but it definitely isn't a controller you have seen the last past few years.

The first thing you will notice about the Steam Controller is that there are two things missing: there are no thumbsticks. Instead of the thumbsticks, Valve has placed two "high-resolution trackpads" that are driven by the players thumbs. With a lot of text and fancy words Valve claims that these trackpads have the resolution and precision that you would expect from a computer mouse. The new controller has a pretty cool feature, the controller will be compatible with both old and new games.

In the center of the controller is a touchscreen which can be used for various things. You will be able to scroll through Steam with it, but developers will also get access to the API so it might get some other uses such as maps or game-menu's as well. Instead of the touchscreens that we all know, this one is actually clickable. What that means that you will have to actually click the screen if you want to select something.

Just like the Steam Machines there will also be a beta for the Steam Controller, and if you participate for the Steam Machine than you will also participate for the Steam Controller. The two differences from the final version of the controller is that there won't be a touchscreen on the beta controller and the controller won't be won't be wireless in the beta.

Valve now has it's own OS, it will have its own hardware and now also has its own controller. Will all these things combined change the way that we play games, and is this enough for Valve to conquer the living room? It will definitely change the way that a lot of gamers play games, but will it turn console gamers into .. PC-console gamers?