i play for leisure with a mouse on a pc and I'm not a pro or anything. Yet, i'm way smoother, faster and accurate at the same time. I mean I can headshot pretty often within 50ms. This guy needs a full second on NON-MOVING targets in counterstrike. He would have zero chance against a mouse user. zero.

Remember that this guy played with the controller for a long time and his job is to make it look like as good as possible.

So yeah, the controller seems ABSOLUTELY fine for a controller (and probably more precise in some cases than a "regular" controller), but please, let's not fool ourselves, this is NOT a PC gaming experience - i.e. this is very far from the level of control a MOUSE provides.

Spam!!

It doesn't show a person playing PC games rapidly - it shows, for example, a common Civ5 action (moving cursor to a position in menu and clicking) being slow and awkward, requiring multiple separate finger movements just to push the cursor from middle of screen to side.

It's better than any other couch-options, but the controls in Civ still looked frustrating instead of fun.

He was explicit in that he was demonstrating 1:1 legacy mouse support, presumably there are other options for non-legacy games (and perhaps legacy games too?)

For example, my macbook track pad takes velocity into account. Something like that could make a big difference for covering large distances. I'm withholding judgment until I try one.

But then I play FPS with a trackball now, so it doesn't seem so alien to me.

He lifts his finger just as much in Portal play as he does in Civ. It's incredibly fast. The ergonomics of this thing make it pretty hard to say that it will be frustrating to track the cursor across the screen just because you have to lift your finger. Think about how you use a trackball. This is basically a trackpad device with the thumb ergonomics of a trackball.

The last time I touched (or saw) a trackball was a dozen years ago, so it's hard to say - but on any acceptable trackpad its dpi should allow to move across the screen in a single motion, shouldn't it?

I.e., if I move my finger across the whole steam controller right pad, then the sensitivity should be high enough to move across the whole screen in that motion while still allowing enough accuracy to click where I want.

I would be shocked if it couldn't be configured that way.

If, for example, some pad was an inch-wide and with 1000 dpi resolution, then it couldn't ever be configured to cover a 2000 pixel wide screen that way - we don't know the specs of the controller elements yet.

With some acceleration it could - finer control with small movements, but quick movements provide more travel. Not sure how well this would work, but I like Apple's implementation on their trackpad (I realise I may be in the minority here!).

It's an example of a control scheme the controller drivers allow you to come up with in order to map to a game's expected mouse-and-keyboard inputs. If a game developer wants to explicitly support the controller, then even better schemes can be designed.

> The skepticism previously was that this controller would be unusable.

Who really thought Valve making a controller would make an unusable one? This was never a concern. The concern here is that it might work well with FPS, RTS etc... (or good enough)... but might not work as good as button based controllers for other genres.

I don't see this competing with a mouse. "Ratcheting" around your POV with your right thumb would make any FPS intolerable.

However, playing a FPS on anything but a Oculus Rift or equivalent is going to feel quaint in a few months.

The controller is not competing with a mouse! Valve is trying to replace the standard console controller and it looks like a large improvement over the thumbstick.

If by ratcheting you mean the repeated movements to look around, that is very similar to moving a mouse with a low sensitivity settings.

Of course this is meant to compete with a mouse. It's intended to let people play mice based games, such as FPS and RTS with a controller.

It's intended to take the gaming pc (and by, extension steam) out of the man-cave and into the living room to compete with consoles. This requires providing people with an ability for people to play FPS and RTS decently with a controller, rather than a mouse, or they are going to stick with their man caves and mice.

It's not competing with a mouse, it's competing with "a mouse and solitude in a man cave", since these are coupled together due to the fact a mouse can't be used in the living room practically. In other words, if this is close enough to the mousing experience to make the net experience of playing PC games in the living room better than the same experience with a mouse in solitude, it will be a hit.

The problem will be in multiplayer. Going online and being repeatedly destroyed by mouse players won't be much fun.

Also I guess difficulty in singleplayer games would have to take the control scheme into account.

In other words, it solves the problem that they are trying to solve well, and does not solve problems that they are not trying to solve?

All the messaging I have been getting from Valve is it is a no compromise controller.