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I always felt that the Duke was ergonomically quite comfortable.
I own two SCs. Broke on both controllers the left shoulder button over the years.
One of my favourite controllers regarding the featureset at release. Gyro, back buttons, two stage analog triggers, touchpad, AA batteries and all of that for a decent price. Steam Input is great and has had a great development over the years.
Otherwise, the controller has some serious flaws. Not very comfortable, stiff shoulder and back buttons, small face buttons and the almost non-existent distance between the upper face buttons and the right trackpad.
Oh yeah, the steam controller has a ton of issues imho. I would say that the best feature is the guide and menu buttons. They feel pretty good and i love seeing that glowing Steam icon. But overall, the controller is uncomfortable to use and feels cheap. I still proudly display it in my living room however l. I makes for a great talking piece.
What would you like from a Steam controller 2? For me, two analog sticks are essential. Preferably they would be either offset or both at the too. Also, a great D-pad and 4 back buttons/levers.
pc hardware is outdated every few years, it will never be able always run the latest games
what valve needs to do is make a game stream system, to play any game using remote play from their servers instead of your own or a friends (remote play together)
How is this a betrayal?
I mean it ought to be obvious if you saw what the product was. The Steam branding is the only reason to pick that particular controller vs. any other gamepad, and if that's your primary motivation to buy a controller, you're probably going to pick the relatively unique controller actually made by Valve rather than a generic gamepad with Steam's logo slapped onto it
When I say probably, I do acknowledge that the Hori controller will probably sell some units regardless since some people will prefer a more traditional controller, but this is definitely going to cut into the sales of the licensed Hori product.
Valve (employees) have said in the past that they have no interest in making a cloud streaming system; which is why they partnered with Nvidia so that publishers that have published a game to GeForce Now! can link it to their Steam profile for the game and users who've purchased it on Steam will automatically be able to play it via GeForce Now.
The original Steam Machines failed for two reasons; software support and Valve leaving hardware to 3rd parties. Firstly, Valve naively thought the "if you build it they will come" would entice game developers to start natively supporting linux. Secondly, they relied on 3rd party hardware vendors, who have no benefit for their hardware to be a loss-leader, to offer compelling hardware options. These two things combined resulted in a chicken & egg paradox where software developers weren't going to invest resources into building their games for linux because there wasn't a large enough install base, and hardware vendors weren't going to build compelling options at competitive price points because there wasn't the volume due to the small software support.
Valve is in a much different position today both in terms of software support and their approach to hardware. They would do very well with an in-house second generation Steam Machine that was ahead of the current generation consoles in terms of performance, and priced similarly to them. They already have Remote Play Together which allows streaming from your "more powerful PC" to a portable device such as your phone or Steam Deck. Launching a fairly powerful Steam Machine console that can do 4K would work well in tandem with Steam Deck.
If Valve launched a "home console" Steam Machine with a custom variant of a Kraken Point APU with 4x Zen5 cores and 2x Zen5c cores coupled with an RDNA4 based GPU configuration in a reasonably small form factor with user-serviceable 2280 M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen4 x4 and a microSD card; they would be very successful at a slightly higher than PS5/Xbox Series X price point at $699. The other potential option for them would be a move to some custom Nvidia chip and/or an Nvidia partnership for their own in-house designed ARM chip. They could certainly deliver a 2x chip solution with a newer generation of Nvidia's Grace CPU cores along with a mid-tier GPU; or use a custom Tegra APU similar to the next generation Switch. We know they have been working hard on building out support for ARM in Proton and it is largely suspected that Deckard will be using some form of ARM CPU. I think either option, if they are able to hit a performance that is slightly more powerful than a PS5 Pro at a $699 price point initially, they would be very successful.
Console licensees already know they're competing with the first party controller for one thing, so they have to make their product competitive in some respect. Hori likely bought this license knowing that the original Steam Controller was discontinued, then basically, as soon as they get their product out to market Valve is like "Surprise! We're selling a new Steam controller! It's going to be so great, y'all should get one!" Kinda isn't fair to Hori if these plans weren't disclosed before they struck a deal.
Second, selling licences for controllers for use on console is a bit of an extortionist's game. If you want your controller to work on console, you basically have to buy the license because of lockouts and maybe patent law (I'm not sure though). It's a fee to get on the platform. On P.C. anybody can make a P.C. gamepad that'll work with steam with or without Valve. Valve even has steam-input for generic controller support, so Hori doesn't really benefit from buying the Valve license, except for getting the Valve logo.
The Steam branded Horipad is a $60 controller. Hori's also making another Windows gamepad for just $40[stores.horiusa.com]. Sure, it's a symmetrical thumbstick controller instead of an asymetrical thumbstick controller, but they otherwise look like similar product. The main differentiation that makes it materially more appealing is the Steam branding.
Seems like hori was banking on the Steam controller giving them an extra air of legitimacy and collector's value that let them hike up the price by 50%. Now they just have excess inventory.
I'm sure it cost them lots of R&D to put a steam logo button on their existing Horipad+ controller[stores.horiusa.com]. Surely it is a devastating loss for them to have to compete with another controller on an, as you've noted, open platform where they already know they have to compete with a plethora of other controllers on the market.
I'm pretty sure Hori will still do just fine with their own reputation for their switches and sticks. What I'd find more interesting is if Valve partnering with Hori could be so that a 2nd generation Steam Controller would use Hori buttons; but given their work on Steam Deck hardware that is more unlikely. Either way, I don't think a 2nd generation Steam Controller will be similar enough to this Steam edition Horipad+ to be interchangeable.
It is pretty obvious it doesn't have trackpads... but I think what you might mean is it doesn't have capacitive thumb sticks; like the Steam Deck does.
Also, it has been out in Japan for almost 6 months. It is launching globally on 12/16/2024 so I'd argue it's not quite "mainly for the Japanese market" since it is already available there; along with another model that is pretty much identical but without the Steam buttons & firmware.