> This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck, under a Creative Commons license. This includes an STP model of each, an STL model of each, and an engineering drawing with critical features/keep outs for each.
Feel free to use these to make your own Puck holders, Controller sweaters, or whatever else you want to create!
Your Steam Controller is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want. That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Controller, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.
[1] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamHardware/SteamController
Valve is the company where we spend a lot of money and they deserve it.
The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.
People often forget that consumers as a whole are the ones holding the power, and the sad part is that rewarding a company with a good product with your money stopped being the business model and it's now the exception.
It's really funny to read this given that Valve largely invented loot boxes!
Gabe is just better at PR than the competition and gamers are irrationally tribal and will defend whatever they consider to be part of while ignoring all the bad parts.
I think Gabe Newell is a visionary for building Steam in 2003, way before Jobs had the same idea, but absolutely everyone and their mother hated Steam back then. I remember the memes on IRC and various forums (and I've been on Steam for a very[1] long time, the first or second day it came out I think). Two decades later, props to them and their useful acolytes for gaslighting the entire gaming community. No idea how Gaben is regarded as some sort of Christlike figure these days, but here we are.
Maybe it's just a "lesser of two evils" thing, as companies/platforms like EA and Ubisoft are the absolute scum of the earth.
If you're a software CEO reading this, your company value doesn't come from your customers, clients or contracts. It's the people doing the work.
It's fine though, because they're nice to players and they've brainwashed them into giving their money to Valve instead of to the developers who actually make the games they fucking play.
Steam lets you trade your items with others. with all the copycats that came out, im not sure any of them allow for you to trade things you bought with other players within the same game, let alone letting them buy it off you for virtual currency you could use to buy other games with
Another POV is, nobody on HN has any idea what he's talking about, it's all vibes.
Are they compliant in the Australian market now?
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
Privately held company
> how long it can possibly last
Till VC's or IPO day
Americans like to clown on the EU, but consumer protections and privacy laws don’t magically pop up on their own, and businesses don’t all magically act in the consumers’ best interests unless they are legally made to.
1) Valve is not in desperate need for capital, Steam and their older games are money printing machines therefore they don’t feel the need to release new games all the time. This is a pro and a con, they don’t feel the need to release same-y, barely iterative titles to make ends meet which means the overall quality of the games we do get is much higher. But at the same time it’s no telling when Valve just decides the juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore.
2) the games that Valve do release are always a standard deviation above the other games of that similar genre at the time. Their ability to take a mechanic, or an engine, or a combination of the two and meaningfully expand and revolutionize in that space cannot be understated - and as game technology progresses, making similar impacts at that scale takes longer and is much harder than the previous title. Half Life Alyx was such a quantum leap in VR quality and I don’t think it’s talked about enough. Deadlock takes the MOBA genre to a whole new level in terms of gameplay depth and complexity. I think they’re taking their time with titles and they know the predecessors that came before them.
For that, I’m willing to wait.
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I vote with my wallet, I avoid buying anything from Steam. Gog and Itch.io are where I go out of my way to spend my money.
Itch.io is amazing! All the coolest games are there + the developer experience is about a million times better than Steam, just sensible and utilitarian. Steam dev experience is a kafkaesque nightmare.
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Back in 2000 because of these features Steam was the epitome of digital evil. it's just that all other tech companies (google, apple, MS, sony, samsung, etc.) have become so supremely evil over time, whereas Valve has remained at its year 2000 level of evil and so now seems positively angelic compared to its peers.
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I will also note that Valve probably are one of the biggest heralds of the year of the Linux desktop just by doing tonnes of work making games run in it well and hassle free. The biggest barrier to entry for Linux had long been that games dont work, thats basically solved now. So they get a bonus point for that.. Steam is still filth I dont want or need on my system tho.
And that's not charity either. Valve realized they needed to hedge their bets when Microsoft threatened to fuck them over with the Windows Store. Linux (or more specifically, SteamOS) is their backup plan.
AFAIK, this restriction doesn’t apply if you’re distributing via a different market place.
If that’s true, that seems fair since you’re relying on Valve’s infrastructure to support the sale.
Berkshire Hathaway, Novo Nordisk, ASML, TSMC, Saab, Atlas Copco, Texas Instruments.
(Perhaps not that many from the US though, relatively speaking? Not sure TBH.)
I mean are we forgetting about kids gambling lootboxes in CS and Valve doing nothing to regulate it?
I mean yes compared to the rest of the gaming companies that are long way gone like Blizzard etc, Valve seems to be the better, but its not like they are saints...
It always amazes me how us as people forget the past (which is not even far away).
*Owner must be a decent human being
Real OGs remember that you could get fairly new AAA games for a song on, like, a random Wednesday. It was part of the initial appeal of Steam. Those explicitly went away because of the refund policy. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/4pnd4p/psa_yes_there... (People were really upset at the time)
Their new refund policy is great, but it wasn't completely free to consumers.
The "played for less than two hours" refund policy is more of a compromise than great, IMHO.
It works well for games that are quick to run and enjoy. However, quite a few of the games I've played will easily burn two hours on loading, compiling shaders, watching unskippable branding animations (splash screens), tuning graphics settings, setting up key bindings, and working past miscellaneous bugs.
Steam's "play time" clock starts when the game executable is launched, and keeps running during all of that nonsense, even at title screens and menus. Some games have run past Valve's return window before I got even a minute of play time.
It would be nice if one of Steam's widely used APIs (Steamworks?) included a way for a game to register when it is actually being played, as opposed to loading or setting up or sitting at a pause screen. I think this would help with the return window problem, and finally make the played hours count on our Steam profiles somewhat accurate.
At least personally, I'd prefer having to wait a few months and having a good refund policy over more sales
Everybody else could stand to take lessons from them
If you want a purple Steam Controller, you can load Valve's STL into your favorite slicer, 3D print a new shell, transplant the electronics, and you're done.
If you want a purple MacBook, could you do the same with those Apple PDFs?
Headphone piece broke. Replacement was covered under warranty. Once. After that it was $30 a pop from amazon for the replacement part. Both of the parts provided under warranty (it was a set of 2) broke in the same way.
Figured if the parts break that regularly, I would wind up spending $500 in just a few years on replacement parts, might as well just get a printer. The part already had a model available (it was apparently a common issue), and the printed version hasn't broken yet.
I know nothing about making models, so the fact that the community already had the replacement part ready to print for me was a huge win, and Valve doing this basically guarantees that there will be a variety of "Controller stand, with puck slot" and replacement part prints available. HUGE win.
It's a flavor of 3D modeling called "constraint-based." You've heard the adage that if you give a million monkeys typewriters, eventually one will write something coherent? Constraint systems embody that same idea: There are infinite possible 3D models. You keep adding constraints until you narrow it down to only one possible solution that fulfills all of them.
Caring about the products they make and their customers seems like sorta the default for most people but large companies learn apathy eventually (or maybe it's mostly the companies that prioritize growth this way that become big). I wonder if less top down control at companies (especially by finance investors) would have them be better to consumers.
Prior to Steam, I used to routinely buy used games, give away copies of games I didn't play anymore, etc. Steam basically ruined all of that.
Still sucks that used games died and the forced game upgrades that come with Steam have their issues too, but PC gaming was a horrible mess before Steam cleaned that up. Heck, I'd rather rebuy a game on Steam than find out what those vintage DVD copy protection does to a modern Windows. Most PCs don't even have a DVD drive anymore anyway.
Can only hope that Stop Killing Games is the first shell in winning back our digital rights
Not sure what you mean by "not great," the Steam Deck is awesome. The one in our household is like 3 years old and still sees daily use. They have been very well received by the PC gaming community.
SteamOS is mostly just the regular Steam client on top of Linux. You will get more or less the same overall experience by starting with a reasonably capable GPU, then installing any mainstream Linux distro, then installing the Steam client, and making a few tweaks. Valve has been very active in upstreaming fixes and features to upstream projects like the Linux kernel and Wine, so the Steam Deck (and soon Steam Machine) doesn't actually have any special sauce, it's just a nice self-contained unit for those who just want to play games and not be bothered by the OS under the hood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS
They aren't going to let you advertise them as Steam-branded hardware without an agreement, but there are multiple handhelds that have done so to be branded officially Steam Compatible.
Likely to change soon though with the steam machine release
The gambling thing is whack but at least it's not polymarket.
