Steam hardware team: “Customers using a product always improve a product”

When you tear open the Steam Controller and Steam Link boxes, you'll see these cool schematic doodles hidden inside. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

When we sat down in the mock-up living room at Valve's headquarters earlier this month in Bellevue, Washington, hardware staffer Erik Johnson handed us one of the first final Steam Controller models, then said emphatically, "we've left most of the hardware work behind us now." That's no small statement for a project like the Steam Controller, of which at least three prototype versions have appeared at expos and conventions over the years—meaning surely more have been generated and discarded behind Valve's closed doors.

A touchscreen came and went, as did a square grid of center buttons and even an odd d-pad arrangement of round buttons. Now, finally, the company has settled on a major, finished design (which we wrote about at length today).

We're kidding, of course. Within minutes of Johnson's declaration, another Valve design-team veteran, Robin Walker, informed us that the company's "always in beta, always in development" ethos was indeed extending to the Steam Controller, if not other products like the Steam Link.