Valve wants to crowd-source the Steam Controller’s design

Is there anybody who knows what you want better than you do? Valve doesn’t think so, which is why it wants the people using the Steam Controller to help improve the design to create their perfect game controller. The company has been fiddling around with the controller for a couple of years already, and has made numerous changes to the design, but even when it finally launches on November 10th, Valve wants users to continuously give it feedback so it can continue to alter and improve the Steam Controller, and even allow users to customize their own controller. 

Valve is all about fan service. And with “over 125 million active users” in its Steam base, that’s a lot of varying expectations to meet. This month, the secretive Bellevue, Washington-based video game developer (Portal, Half-Life) is about to finally bring to market a suite of its Steam Machines, a console-like living room solution for its PC-gaming base. The hardware rollout’s been a long time coming for Valve — the original Steam Machine announcement was made back in September 2013 — but at least one aspect of it has been very public: the evolution of the Steam Controller. And its design is about to, quite literally, be put in the hands of consumers. “Anytime we’ve let the community get involved in the construction, the creation, the modification of things we’ve created, it always worked out fantastically,” says Valve designer Robin Walker, speaking at the company’s headquarters. “It was always better. It would be utterly bizarre if, for some reason, that wasn’t the case for hardware.”