Valve To Unveil Final Steam Controller Design & VR Hardware At GDC

It feels like we’ve been waiting forever for Steam Machines and SteamOS itself to become a big deal, but so far the impact of either on the market has been quite limited. That could soon change, though, as Valve has announced that it will be showing off the final Steam Controller at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference next week. And, for a special treat, we’ll be learning of a ‘Steam VR’ hardware system.

Valve notes that GDC 15 will mark the 13th anniversary of when the company first announced Steam, and it goes without saying that the service has certainly grown to become a big deal. Today, if you’re a serious PC gamer, you’ve almost undoubtedly got Steam.

While it’ll be great to see the final design of the Steam Controller, it seems really up in the air as to whether or not Steam Machines is actually going to take off. As I said above, it feels like we’ve been waiting forever for something big to happen, and even at last year’s CES – 16 months ago – a number of companies jumped on board with their own “Steam Machines”. Have they grown tired of waiting for Valve’s big push? It’s hard to say, but Valve does say it will have hardware to show off next week.

The Steam VR system is something that will be well-worth keeping an eye out for. The fact that Valve had such a thing in the works doesn’t come as a surprise, as we learned a couple of years ago that Valve let Jeri Ellsworth and Rich Johnson take the company’s AR project to make it their own, all because the company had wanted to focus on VR instead. Well, that was over two-years-ago, so hopefully what will be shown off next week will be exciting – or at least interesting.

Here’s to hoping that the Steam controller will be awesome, because I keep telling myself I need an upgrade to my aging Xbox 360 gamepad.