Without any analog sticks on Valve's news Steam controller, feedback for player movement relies heavily on the controller's haptic technology. Using a variety of games PC games, Valve demonstrates their new controller with a number of popular PC titles.
To begin the demonstration, Valve employees play Portal 2 and use the trackpads for both movement and camera control. With relative ease, the player zooms through one of the beginning puzzles in the game's single player.
Valve wants to accurately mimic mouse cursor movements, so they boot up Civilization 5 to demonstrate mouse intensive gameplay. Using the right trackpad, the player moves the mouse cursor to perform actions and uses the left trackpad to control the overhead camera. The bottom buttons, located on the back of the controller, handle the camera zoom.
As a test of the trackpad precision, the video launches the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive training course to shoot down stationary targets. While the player runs through the course with high accuracy, hitting moving, shooting targets requires an entirely different finesse.
Valve also recently announced the prototype specifications for their Steam Machines hardware. The Steam hardware will soon begin shipping to selected beta testers.