I've played console games with three other people scrunched up on a love seat; lying on the couch; sitting crosslegged on the floor; and sprawled out in a beanbag chair. Sometimes I get tired of having my hands in my lap, so I stretch them out behind my head. If I want to relocate, I can keep playing as I walk across the room, or pause and carry the controller in one hand and my drink in the other.

That's the sort of flexibility I want in a "couch controller," not just sitting still on the couch by myself.

"I’m a happy Steam customer happily using my happy mouse and keyboard. I don’t want a controller? You can’t make a sentence into a question by just putting a question-mark at the end. But we’re happy you’re happy, and by all means keep using whatever input method makes sense for you. Rest assured, we won’t abandon you. We love mice and keyboards, too."

And the problem here is not negligible. CoD series games will be miserable to play with a gamepad versus mouse+kb'ers, and those games would likely be quite popular on SteamBox.

"why not find a solution which incorporates mouse+kb instead of avoiding it?"

It sounds like they feel the same way to do. Mouse + Keyboard is already viable across a very wide spectrum of games. They don't need "a solution which incorporates mouse+kb", because that already is a solution (as you note, there's no real problem there).

However, for those that want a controller experience, there's not a viable solution. Controllers work across a pretty narrow spectrum of games. That is the problem that they're trying to address.

If you want/need to sell something in the millions, it kind of needs to be least common denominator. Gamers understand controllers as the basic interface for tv gaming, so they will buy them.

Gamers don't buy keyboards to put on their TV's so Valve is being smart by not forcing a square peg in a round hole. They want the Steam Machines to sell. A mouse and keyboard won't sell.

1. cultural expecations. consoles have controller gizmos. people expect it. its a different experience than just running an HDMI cable from your PC to a TV and calling it a day. Its a console. It lives next to your TV all the time. Its supposed to have a controller, because Nintendo's NES had one back in 1985. Cultural expectations and traditions are a powerful force.

2. there are many games that are actually superior to play with a controller than with a mouse and keyboard. Platformer games come to mind. Thats a major genre of consoles and always has been, and alot of indie game companies are exploring the genre again on the steam platform. At the moment I have to use an XBox controller plugged in to my PC to play. If Valve offered their own controller I'd gladly use it instead (assuming its good).

If you haven't tried before, I highly recommend doing time trials with KB+M. It's a completely different game.

I suppose my "complaint" is that they could do a better job of bridging the gap, but perhaps I am wrong. You do make a good point that the mouse+kb may be too cumbersome for some (most?) consoler switchers.

I do wish that I could see what sort of solution Valve could come up with if forced to keep the primary mouse+kb, though. Some sort of streamlined solution which you partly imagine in your post.

I always wondered if something like that would be possible.. So you'd have all your precision mouse movement without the akward balancing of loose things while sitting on the couch, or getting up and sitting down.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2007/12/phantom-keyboar/

Aaaand looks like the keyboard actually made it to market, there's even one on ebay. I had no idea.

hoverfield: http://www.correlatedmagnetics.com/products/hoverfield-non-c...

Someone did some tests a while back with a gamepad-trackball (trackball replacing the right thumbstick). They found that pro PC FPS gamers did just as well with it as with mouse+keyboard, after a short adjustment period.

Here's some quotes from the most recent attempt (out of three that I know of) to crowdfund one of those (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/485185897/revolve-goes-w...):

"...I attained a level of accuracy I had never experienced without a mouse and keyboard combination." - Gerry Block, IGN

"You will spend less time fighting your controls and more time fighting bad guys." - Grant Collier, Co-Founder of Infinity Ward and Co-Creator of Call of Duty

Of course it failed anyway, because gamers all went "LOOKS DUMB LOL" and refused to read further. I was really hoping that Valve's controller would be a trackballpad; if it actually made it to market, I'm confident that ongoing positive reviews would lead to popular adoption.

It is a reason that console games come with built in auto aim on all FPS shooters...

But come now, my original statement was hardly all that bold. Obviously the reason that gamepad aiming sucks is just that thumbstick aiming sucks. Replace the thumbstick, solve the problem. (And as a bonus, get analog movement as well as analog aiming--the traditional WASD doesn't allow for speed gradations.) I used to game exclusively with a trackball and never had any troubles. The only reason I stopped is that nobody makes trackballs for left-handers anymore that are any damn good. And if you don't believe me, I just gave you a couple of quotes from gaming professionals.

As for Starcraft, you're right, it wouldn't work; not because of the pointing device, but because a gamepad doesn't have enough buttons to manage all the hotkeys. In my original post, I called out FPSes specifically for that reason.

Edit: Rereading your comment, I guess you might mean PC gamers who are sitting on their couches. I don't think that's the market this is after; it's trying to get console gamers onto Steam by providing them a cool new product that will work well with the games they have. This makes that a much smaller shift for those gamers than the keyboard and mouse. Will they still get owned by more traditional PC gamers (since they're now competing directly), as you suggest? I guess that's possible, but that's just saying "console gaming needs to stay separate", not "they should use a keyboard and mouse for console games", which just isn't on the table any more than PC gamers are going to switch to a handheld controller.

See: CoD, Battlefield, Quake, etc. All prefer exact aiming with a mouse over fudging analog input sticks with aim assist.

By your wording, no, console gamers don't use keyboards / mice, because the games they play on consoles are not compatible with them, and are not designed to use them. Very few genres (fighting, brawlers) sometimes prefer controllers to keyboards, and when they do it is usually a personal choice, or the market has better alternatives to both (ie, fight sticks).

Mouse is a pointing input - for a movement of 1 unit, your view changes by 1 unit. If you stop moving the mouse, your view stops moving.

Controller stick is a velocity input - for a movement of 1 unit, your view starts moving at a speed of 1 unit. If you bring the stick back to center, your view stops moving.

It could be that the Steam controller trackpad is precise enough to be a pointing input sensor, which could enable precise aiming. But it's too early to tell before the first reviews are out.

Joystick calibration utilities, for instance, tend to take stick position as a position input, and ISTR a number of PC sims that preferred joystick input but could use a mouse like a non-auto-centering joystick.

From what I can find online, the PS3 controller is 10-bit per axis (1024 positions on either axis), the Xbox 360 is either 8-bit (256 positions) or 16-bit (64k positions.)

A 25-way joystick of the type you describe wouldn't be usable for most console games, whether as a position or velocity input.

Much more important is the platform market share for hardcore games, like CoD and Battlefield. It simply isn't true that people prefer the PC version [1], despite the inferior controls. CoD sells vastly more copies for console than for PC [2]. It's not even close.

If Valve wants to break into that market and compete with Xbox and PS, it needs a controller.

[1] Though I do, and it sounds like you do too.

[2] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31995/Exclusive_Black_Ops... (I recognize this doesn't include Steam sales, but the point still stands)

Who buys retail games anymore?

Console will always be at disadvantage to the PC in this genre due to its low frame rate (usually 121+ fps is considered slandered for the genre in order to make use of a 120hz refresh rate). Consoles currently output about 20 - 30 fps, not really acceptable for competitive play in a FPS.