"A next-gen Steam Deck would do the same": Valve are already eyeing Steam Controller hardware upgrades to reuse in future handhelds

Valve springiness RPS a glimpse into the Deck’s fancy thumbstick future

The Steam Deck’s power connected the caller Steam Controller could scarcely beryllium much obvious, the gamepad looking arsenic if the Deck’s 2 grip sections were cleaved disconnected and stitched unneurotic by Valve’s maddest hardware vivisectionists. That said, nary tiny magnitude of the Steam Controller’s entreaty lies successful the hidden refinements it makes to those seemingly borrowed inputs: refinements similar the much unchangeable D-pad and the much precise, drift-resistant TMR (Tunneling Magnetoresistance) thumbsticks.

Now, there’s a bully accidental that these improvements could caput backmost the different way. As Valve technologist Steve Cardinali and decorator Lawrence Yang told maine successful an interview, which besides touched connected the ongoing Steam Machine delays, there’s plentifulness astir the Steam Controller that they’d similar to enactment into a imaginable next-gen Steam Deck.

"The TMR thumbsticks are a large one," Cardinali says of perchance reusable features. "This is our archetypal foray into magnetic sensing thumb sticks, and immoderate we do, if we person occurrence with this, we'd astir apt similar to transportation that forward."

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Cardinali besides thinks the Steam Deck 2: The Next One mightiness payment from the Steam Controller’s Grip Sense, a brace of sensors – 1 successful each grip – that tin activate gyro controls erstwhile squeezed. Or beryllium freely remapped, similar immoderate different input.

"The different one, wherever we're truly funny to spot what radical extremity up doing with it, is Grip Sense, due to the fact that that is simply a caller diagnostic and we privation to spot each the ways radical tin deliberation of utilizing it too gyro aiming," helium explains. "That was the archetypal crushed for creating it, but successful the office, we recovered different fig of usage cases that we deliberation are cool. Like opening up a limb instrumentality conscionable by releasing your fingers a small bit, past making your selection, and past closing the grip to prime the item. That could person potential."

"And past also, determination are different things, similar improvements to the D-pad", Yang adds. "Every portion of hardware we marque builds connected the happening we made before, and everything caller that we marque takes each of the learnings, whether bully oregon bad, from erstwhile hardware, and integrates it into it. So yeah, a next-gen Steam Deck would bash the same."

Without formally announcing anything, Valve person been talking openly astir what they’d similar from a caller Steam Deck for years, astir often successful notation to the important show bump they’d privation to unafraid implicit the archetypal model. It’s astir apt inactive a agelong mode off, particularly considering the constituent shortages holding up the caller Steam Machine and Steam Frame VR headset, but it sounds similar astatine slightest idiosyncratic bits could look acquainted erstwhile it arrives.