"A next-gen Steam Deck would do the same": Valve are already eyeing Steam Controller hardware upgrades to reuse in future handhelds

Valve give RPS a glimpse into the Deck’s fancy thumbstick future

The Steam Deck’s influence on the new Steam Controller could scarcely be more obvious, the gamepad looking as if the Deck’s two grip sections were cleaved off and stitched together by Valve’s maddest hardware vivisectionists. That said, no small amount of the Steam Controller’s appeal lies in the hidden refinements it makes to those seemingly borrowed inputs: refinements like the more stable D-pad and the more precise, drift-resistant TMR (Tunneling Magnetoresistance) thumbsticks.

Now, there’s a good chance that these improvements could head back the other way. As Valve engineer Steve Cardinali and designer Lawrence Yang told me in an interview, which also touched on the ongoing Steam Machine delays, there’s plenty about the Steam Controller that they’d like to put into a potential next-gen Steam Deck.

"The TMR thumbsticks are a big one," Cardinali says of potentially reusable features. "This is our first foray into magnetic sensing thumb sticks, and whatever we do, if we have success with this, we'd probably like to carry that forward."

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Cardinali also thinks the Steam Deck 2: The Next One might benefit from the Steam Controller’s Grip Sense, a pair of sensors – one in each grip – that can activate gyro controls when squeezed. Or be freely remapped, like any other input.

"The other one, where we're really interested to see what people end up doing with it, is Grip Sense, because that is a new feature and we want to see all the ways people can think of using it besides gyro aiming," he explains. "That was the original reason for creating it, but in the office, we found another number of use cases that we think are cool. Like opening up a weapon wheel just by releasing your fingers a little bit, then making your selection, and then closing the grip to select the item. That could have potential."

"And then also, there are other things, like improvements to the D-pad", Yang adds. "Every piece of hardware we make builds on the thing we made before, and everything new that we make takes all of the learnings, whether good or bad, from previous hardware, and integrates it into it. So yeah, a next-gen Steam Deck would do the same."

Without formally announcing anything, Valve have been talking openly about what they’d like from a new Steam Deck for years, most often in reference to the significant performance bump they’d want to secure over the original model. It’s probably still a long way off, especially considering the component shortages holding up the new Steam Machine and Steam Frame VR headset, but it sounds like at least individual bits could look familiar once it arrives.