I'm excited about where Valve is going with this, of course, but to be honest I'm concerned about controllers the most. Buying a good controller for a PC is not hard, but it's not simple either. Picture yourself as a "living room console guy" getting into PC gaming. You'd like to use a controller for a certain game.
Consider:
- You can use your XBox360, PS3 controller, or WiiMote, but that's not obvious. You'll need to do some research to figure out that you CAN do it as well as HOW to do it. Again, the steps aren't particularly complicated (especially for the XBox wired controller), but remember who we're targeting, here. If you don't know much about this stuff, you might be worried you'll break something or won't be able to hook your controller back to your console.
- If this doesn't occur to you or you'd rather not use your console controllers, you might be tempted to buy one of those gaming controllers you see at Radio Shack, Best Buy, or somewhere online. Chances are high that the controller you bought will be quite shitty in comparison to your console controllers. You'll notice everything from drifting inputs to cheap buttons to just plain uncomfortable hand feel. You'll convince yourself that you just picked wrongly, so you do some more research. You eventually come upon something pretty good, but it's expensive and it's STILL not your XBox 360 controller.
- If you get past all this (whether that's finding a good 3rd party controller or reusing your console controller), you're still not QUITE sure how each new PC game will react with a controller. Sure, maybe the mappings make sense, but you worry that you'll come upon something that requires an action the developers forgot to map to a controller button. Or maybe it'll just feel wrong because the controls for your particular game were clearly designed to work best for the physical characteristics of a mouse and keyboard. You know with enough tweaking this won't be a problem, but it still bothers you that you have to tweak anything in the first place.
Nothing I've outlined above is a problem for advanced gamers, but if something like a Steam Machine is ever going to take over the living room, it has to be a natural plug n' play experience with respect to input devices. And I mean natural for your mom or uncle, not for you.
Luckily it sounds like Valve will be addressing this head-on; I am more excited about what they have to say about this than about what the specs of any particular Steam Machine might be or what the beta might look like.