Valve’s Steam Controller is a wireless handheld game controller designed for PC gaming… including PC games that you’d normally play with a mouse and keyboard. While it doesn’t have QWERTY keys, it does have two trackpads that you can use in lieu of a mouse, trackball, joystick, or steering wheel.

First announced in 2013 and released in 2015, the Steam Controller is now officially discontinued, with no replacement in sight.

You can still use one if you’ve got one though… and if you don’t already have a Steam Controller, now’s the time to buy one. Until stock runs out, Valve is selling the Steam Controller for just $5, which is 1/10th the original price.

Back when Valve designed the Steam Controller, the company was also putting its weight behind the idea of Steam Machines — gaming computers that shipped with the Linux-based Steam OS instead of Windows.

Steam Machines never really took off as a product category and only a small percentage of folks who use Valve’s Steam game client seem to be doing so from Linux computers.

But the Steam Controller works with Windows too. It’s a highly customizable controller that has some devoted fans… but which can also be way more complicated to use than a basic Xbox controller.

Still, $5 for a versatile game controller isn’t bad.

The discontinuation of the Steam Controller comes almost exactly a year after Valve retired another niche device — the Steam Link game streaming gadget that let you stream PC games over a home network so you could play in a different room from your gaming rig. But Steam Link lives on in the form of a set of mobile apps for Android and iOS.

The Steam Controller will soon just be out of stock.

via The Verge and Hexus

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13 replies on “Valve discontinues the Steam Controller (with a $5 closeout sale)”

  2. Cool. I just got one. 13 bucks. So what games work well with the Steam controller?

  5. It’s a shame.
    I really wanted Valve to succeed in building their own Operating System, their own Controller, and their own Console. So that there would be another major competitor in the market against the likes of Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

    Granted this was back in 2013-2015 and there has been limited success overall. SteamOS has practically dissolved into Wine/Ubuntu Steam Client. While the SteamPad is discontinued as people prefer the Xbox One S (comfort) controller or Switch JoyCons (pocketability) instead. And the SteamBoxes have disappeared as people start building Gaming PCs with Ncase M1 (performance) or Dell Optiplex’es (budget).

    1. Common, how many people build their own consoles? It is a minority. Most people do buy something from shelves – real consoles, indeed, or something well-packed with a middle range GPU: Zotac ZBOXes, NUC Canyons, Alienware Alphas and so on.

      Sad, they abandoned it, but, well, it is a market problem. The market doesn’t want their consoles, links and even pads (though I think their pads are marvelous for PC games, like TBS or something like that).

      They don’t have balls big enough to make SteamOS-exclusives.
      It is games who sells consoles, not consoles who sells games.

  8. Just FYI, looks like it won’t let people add more than one at a time to their cart for checkout – at least, it wouldn’t let me do so using the Steam Android app. There’s about $8 shipping on top of the $5 controller price, $13 total. Still, I had some Steam wallet credit, so I figured why not?

      1. I don’t have it yet and I’ve never used one before, so I’m not sure. My purchase was made purely in the spirit of adventure.

      2. I think it’s worth it. It’s not as widely supported as I’d like, and it’s not as good a general purpose controller as the console controllers are, but it does some things very well and had some interesting ideas for how to make a controller focused on the types of games that are popular on PC but don’t do well on consoles. It’s kind of disappointing that it didn’t take off in a bigger way.

    2. It doesn’t do that on the website either. That’s probably because they don’t want one guy buying 100 of them and selling them on ebay later.

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