Valve’s secret Steam Dev Days has been full of revelations, as active users for Steam rises to 75 million worldwide.
When first unveiled the Steam Controller gamepad featured a touchscreen between the two touchpad controllers, and its only buttons were squeezed in round the sides as insubstantial-looking triangles. That has now all changed.
The new version of the controller has no touchscreen in the middle and gains a D-pad (on the left) and a set of four traditionally-arranged buttons (on the right).
The change was announced at the Steam Dev Days conference in Seattle, to which press are not invited. Although though in attendance claim that Valve’s primary reason for the change is to improve backwards compatibility with more games.
The controller was also revealed as using two AA buttons and might yet have biometric feedback added to it, although Valve hasn’t figured out where to put it.
Other revelations at the conference include a September release date for Alienware’s Steam Machine, although as with all of them so far that probably only counts for America.
The talk wasn’t entirely about Steam Machines though, with Valve revealing that the Steam service in general now has more than 75 million active users, an increase of 10 million since October and only a little less than the installed userbase of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
As the download service continues to evolve Valve boss Gabe Newell revealed that Steam Greenlight would be phased out. The system was introduced as a means to allow the Steam community to vote on indie games they thought should be added to the service.
‘Our goal is to make Greenlight go away,’ said Newell. ‘Not because it’s not useful, but because we’re evolving.’
It’s not entirely clear what this means but one part of the evolution is to bring music, TV, and films to SteamOS by the time it launches properly.
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