Valve's new Steam Controller design was officially unveiled on the company's blog on Friday, just ahead of the Game Developers Conference in California.
The developers first showcased the design back in January during the company's annual Steam Dev Days, according to CNET. The updated controller showcased a new d-pad and X, Y, A, and B button, with a similar design to Xbox controller.
"The original Steam Controller concept contained a square touch screen with buttons surrounding the edges, while the prototype shown off last year relied on a four-pad touch interface in lieu of installing full-blown LCD screens," CNET reports. "But Valve apparently took to heart user feedback and made some tough choices in simplifying the device to make it more in line with modern console controller design."
Another noticeable diffence between the original design concept shown in January is Valve completely scrapped the touchscreen on the controller, replacing it with a logo.
"The removal of the touchscreen in favor of analog buttons is most likely a more ergonomic choice, but the placement of the buttons - below the touchpads rather than above - may feel a bit out of place," Geek reports. "The DualShock 4 - widely heralded as the most comfortable controller in a long time - places both the D-pad and face buttons above the analog sticks...With the removal of the touchscreen, at least Valve won't have to deal with comparisons to the Wii U mutant."
However, the Steam Controller is still in its development stages and Valve has yet to finalize its design. According to Valve's blog, the company is using the GDC conference to gain feedback for the controller and find ways to improve the design.
"We're currently busy hand-building ten of the very latest iterations of the Steam Controller prototype to bring with us to GDC," Valve wrote. "Even though our limited internal play testing has been going really well, we're excited to get some feedback from our customers on these latest changes."
