Comment by roer
4 hours ago
I love the readme on the gitlab page [1]. It feels so.. friendly :)
> This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck, under a Creative Commons license. This includes an STP model of each, an STL model of each, and an engineering drawing with critical features/keep outs for each.
Feel free to use these to make your own Puck holders, Controller sweaters, or whatever else you want to create!
Your Steam Controller is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want. That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Controller, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.
[1] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamHardware/SteamController
Sometimes I wonder what we did to deserve Valve and how long it can possibly last.
We let kids gamble so much money in games that they don't have to nickel and dime the adults.
That's true now, but Valve has been like this since the start, way before skins and microtransactions.
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They also nickel and dime the adults, but only the ones who make the games.
It's fine though, because they're nice to players and they've brainwashed them into giving their money to Valve instead of to the developers who actually make the games they fucking play.
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Most other companies would still nickel and dime the adults, though.
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"We" is the kids' parents, and I would assume it's the parents' money.
Does Valve even own games played by kids anymore? Aren't all of the cs skin traders and tf2 players in their 20s at youngest?
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The problem with Steam is developers are paying 30% to introduce their players to CSGO and DOTA2.
Another POV is, nobody on HN has any idea what he's talking about, it's all vibes.
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Privately owned company, GabeN is getting on a bit now, he does have a son mind, we'll see what happens later on.
Gabe better be immortal.
I really wish the company would talk more about the post-Gabe transition, or at least begin to give us a rough indication of where the company plans to go.
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
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He’s going to die in a fucking scuba diving accident, I have nightmares about it constantly
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Don’t mention the cs case gambling
If your “we” is Australia, you could have implemented consumer protections then sued Valve for ignoring them: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...
That was 9 years ago.
Are they compliant in the Australian market now?
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son of gaben may live upto the legend, otherwise it ends with him
I just wish they made more games than they currently do. Their games are always nicely polished and unique / creative in their own respect.
Valve practically has a monopoly on PC gaming, I think they're pretty fat and happy too ;D
Valve will only be good if it stays privately owned. Good things go to shit as soon as investors become involved
I felt the same about early 00s Google. It will probably not last forever.
I'm optimistic provided they continue to be privately held and don't parachute in a professional executive to be CEO after Gabe departs.
This is the answer. Enshitification is a requirement of the fiduciary duty of public companies. A private company can stay good forever.
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Until the current management retires, as it usually goes.
In my experience family held companies do tend to keep their values somewhat intact on succession.
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They're a private company. Not all private companies are good, but all public ones inevitably turn terrible.
Lots of counter-examples.
ASML, Berkshire Hathaway, Novo Nordisk, TSMC, Saab, Atlas Copco.
(Perhaps not that many from the US though, if that's your perspective.)
I think many more companies would operate like this if acquisition and mergers were much more difficult.
Valve wasn't always like this. They were infamous for never allowing refunds, but due to EU regulations they just did a complete about face and has one of the friendliest refund policies in the ESD business. Probably just behind Costco or something.
The introduction of the refund made them get rid of their deep discounted flash sales though.
Real OGs remember that you could get fairly new AAA games for a song on, like, a random Wednesday. It was part of the initial appeal of Steam. Those explicitly went away because of the refund policy. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/4pnd4p/psa_yes_there... (People were really upset at the time)
Their new refund policy is great, but it wasn't completely free to consumers.
> Their new refund policy is great,
The "played for less than two hours" refund policy is more of a compromise than great, IMHO.
It works well for games that are quick to run and enjoy. However, quite a few of the games I've played will easily burn two hours on loading, compiling shaders, watching unskippable branding animations (splash screens), tuning graphics settings, setting up key bindings, and working past miscellaneous bugs.
Steam's "play time" clock starts when the game executable is launched, and keeps running during all of that nonsense, even at title screens and menus. Some games have run past Valve's return window before I got even a minute of play time.
It would be nice if one of Steam's widely used APIs (Steamworks?) included a way for a game to register when it is actually being played, as opposed to loading or setting up or sitting at a pause screen. I think this would help with the return window problem, and finally make the played hours count on our Steam profiles somewhat accurate.
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They still have absolutely massive sales, they just aren't random anymore.
At least personally, I'd prefer having to wait a few months and having a good refund policy over more sales
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I wish more IT companies were like Valve.
Valve and Costco are the only two companies I respect anymore
Everybody else could stand to take lessons from them
Imagine if everybody did this. You break some stupid plastic part on something? No need to throw it away, just print an exact replacement on the spot. Or maybe tweak it first so it's less flimsy then print the replacement.
Sounds like this is just the external dimensions? That's mostly just useful for creating accessories. That's not too special, Apple does this too. https://developer.apple.com/accessories/dimensional-drawings...
Those PDFs are useless.
If you want a purple Steam Controller, you can load Valve's STL into your favorite slicer, 3D print a new shell, transplant the electronics, and you're done.
If you want a purple MacBook, could you do the same with those Apple PDFs?
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This is why I bought a 3d printer.
Headphone piece broke. Replacement was covered under warranty. Once. After that it was $30 a pop from amazon for the replacement part. Both of the parts provided under warranty (it was a set of 2) broke in the same way.
Figured if the parts break that regularly, I would wind up spending $500 in just a few years on replacement parts, might as well just get a printer. The part already had a model available (it was apparently a common issue), and the printed version hasn't broken yet.
I know nothing about making models, so the fact that the community already had the replacement part ready to print for me was a huge win, and Valve doing this basically guarantees that there will be a variety of "Controller stand, with puck slot" and replacement part prints available. HUGE win.
Fusion is a really cool tool to learn.
It's a flavor of 3D modeling called "constraint-based." You've heard the adage that if you give a million monkeys typewriters, eventually one will write something coherent? Constraint systems embody that same idea: There are infinite possible 3D models. You keep adding constraints until you narrow it down to only one possible solution that fulfills all of them.
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Large companies obviously are happy to screw their customers in various ways but I've had pretty good luck with smaller and especially more local businesses. I once had a jeweler gift me an ultrasonic cleaner when I asked them how best to clean a difficult to clean ring (presumably they had recently bought a new one).
Caring about the products they make and their customers seems like sorta the default for most people but large companies learn apathy eventually (or maybe it's mostly the companies that prioritize growth this way that become big). I wonder if less top down control at companies (especially by finance investors) would have them be better to consumers.
This was always the dream for 3D printing, heck going back to classic Star Trek replicators and other science fiction. Granted, even with these models available it's kinda difficult to print large organic shapes like the main housing shells on most affordable consumer printers so I suspect there might not be too many people actually doing it. However, having the exact CAD files makes designing mods and 3rd party upgrades much easier.
Going a step further, imagine hardware manufacturers noticing specific defects, then publishing new updated CAD files for a part that lasts better than the last, for customers who already have 3D printers to print their own upgrades/"patches".
That can work, but 3d printing doesn't in general make for strong parts (layers). Most of the time you want some form of molding or CNC subtractive machining (either plastic of metal) - while some hobbyists have this, 3d printing is far more common. (and often easier)
I think at this point Steam might as well just release the hounds and let third parties build and sell steam compatible hardware (the Android play). Their own attempts have been, well, not great. Dealing with hardware supply chains is a very different game than software. They already have a platform, the hardware is purely for distribution. Whether they make a profit on hardware or not doesn't really matter. They are basically the opposite of Apple.
Steam already supports 3rd-party controllers and VR headsets. SteamOS is available on several 3rd-party handhelds. What more do you need for "steam compatible hardware"?
According to Wikipedia, they already officially support the Lenovo Legion Go S.
Not sure what you mean by "not great," the Steam Deck is awesome. The one in our household is like 3 years old and still sees daily use. They have been very well received by the PC gaming community.
SteamOS is mostly just the regular Steam client on top of Linux. You will get more or less the same overall experience by starting with a reasonably capable GPU, then installing any mainstream Linux distro, then installing the Steam client, and making a few tweaks. Valve has been very active in upstreaming fixes and features to upstream projects like the Linux kernel and Wine, so the Steam Deck (and soon Steam Machine) doesn't actually have any special sauce, it's just a nice self-contained unit for those who just want to play games and not be bothered by the OS under the hood.
As far as I know there's nothing preventing third parties from building and selling hardware with SteamOS or a similar software stack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS
They aren't going to let you advertise them as Steam-branded hardware without an agreement, but there are multiple handhelds that have done so to be branded officially Steam Compatible.
They tried this many years ago with the original steam machines, it went horribly. Also, you can install SteamOS or Bazite on most machines. Not sure what the issue is here.
SteamOS does not currently really work on modern desktops/laptops. You can force it but it’s really not made for it. They’re pretty clear about that, I think they even pulled down the OS download page from their site and now clearly mark it as for restoring old machines.
Likely to change soon though with the steam machine release
What is "Steam compatible hardware"? Isn't that like saying "App Store compatible hardware"?
"Your steam controller is yours, unlike your games, which you have no right to resell, or leave them as inheritance when you die"
Thank God the publishers had nothing to do with those onerous terms in exchange for using Valves storefront!
Can only hope that Stop Killing Games is the first shell in winning back our digital rights
I love steam. I have a lot of concerns with a lot of the companies shuffling billions around. But not steam. They treat everyone fair.
The gambling thing is whack but at least it's not polymarket.