I said it somewhere else, but I think Valve actually did factor in wishlist counts. The problem is in the percentage of those that convert to sales. For games, the median conversion rate is 10% to 20% of wishlists converting to sales within the first week. I expect the Steam Controller's conversion rate was much higher.

Valve may have even tried anticipating this from Deck sales and still failed to account for the Deck conversion rate still being lower due to the greater price.

I got mine yesterday. Copying my thoughts from a comment in another thread:

Don't mind my essay here. TLDR: I love this thing.

I got mine yesterday. It's the 512GB with no controller since I already got the controller separately and the 2TB version felt like an especially bad deal.

I was initially on the fence about the price and reserved just to get into the queue to make the actual buy decision later. I was expecting more people to have thoughts on it out before my spot in the queue came up, but I ended up getting my purchase email very quickly on 6/30. I let the email sit for a day but ended up deciding to pull the trigger for a few reasons:

One, I've owned every first-party Valve device so far, and all of them have been more than the sum of their parts. Two, I wanted a HTPC, travel, and LAN party PC that's a bit less restraining than a laptop. Three, being a bit of a performance snob has been distracting me away from actually gaming and I wanted to get back into the no nonsense side of PC gaming again. And four, I don't mind spending a little extra money advancing Linux, repairable hardware, etc.

I feel like I have to acknowledge reviews from the PC space have been largely negative, but they seem to be undervaluing a lot: the form factor (a 6" cube is still tiny compared to almost all other SFF builds), performance per volume (almost the entire cube is a heat sink), and the benefits of more standard performance targets we've already seen with the Deck.

As for first impressions, the device is packaged well, and unboxing was very satisfying. I did have some trouble getting my controller paired since it was already paired to my existing desktop PC and plugging it in directly wasn't enough to get around that like I expected, but looking up how to pair it to multiple PCs got me past that.

I spent a few hours testing a mix of light to demanding games, and I'm more than happy with what it can do. I haven't tried gaming beyond 1080p yet, but I'm going to be very selective about when and how I do that. 512GB is proving to be plenty of space for what I'm playing at any one time, and I think that would still be true if I didn't have other devices acting as additional storage.

I feel like all my expectations above have been validated, and now I'm really looking forward to getting the Frame. I want to make a travel backpack or suitcase with foam cutouts for the whole set.

Yeah, there's a reason only a handful of companies on the planet even try it. On top of the time and technology requirements, there's also a massive patent minefield to navigate. Qualcomm is something like 20 times bigger than Valve with chips as their entire business model, and even they're still not big enough. Qualcomm contracts TMSC and Samsung to use their fabs.

Edit: added a bit...

It also means you can perfectly shape accessories for the controller like skins, docks, cases, attachment brackets, etc.

Plus the lower waterline from the weight of the bottle.

I watch my mouth in general, but I wish we would stop normalizing the idea that people have a right to not be offended. Also, if someone uses a slur, any judgement on them should be based on the intent behind the usage, not the usage itself. Cue the Michael Scott R-word clip here.

Lol. I use hedging terms constantly, because I'm autistic and precision in language matters to me. 99% certainty is still enough uncertainty to justify a "likely." I'm not planning to change that even if more and more people think my writing is AI.

Everyone loves Technology Connections. Also, watching Alec rant about Christmas lights every year is tradition now.

Even having high-end enthusiast hardware, I want those devices as the baseline too. Whatever optimizations they do still apply over the whole hardware spectrum.

Also, you can technically say 2030 is less than 4 years away if you want to traumatize old people. Lol.

Yeah, I definitely think how much you value this controller is directly proportional to how much of the full Steam Deck control scheme you use. As a heavy user of the Deck's touchpads to the point I'll never consider another handheld without them, this is still a day one purchase for me even at $99, but I'm not going to recommend it to anyone without huge caveats.

Not always. Most photos I take are really just intended for future me. A few of them have famous things I care about.

Are you trolling or do you genuinely believe that? I remember the original too. YouTube is applying AI filters on many old videos and reuploads, and the end result is distrust of many videos we used to trust.

I peeked. It didn't seem that bad, just memes and shitposts.

I also don't mind releases taking the "when it's ready" approach. It's kind of refreshing actually.

In case you haven't already, preload your Steam Wallet and make sure to account for any tax. As someone who got my Steam Deck order in the first 15 minutes it dropped, payment processing was the biggest barrier then. They might have fixed it since, but they also might not have. Good luck!

Thanks for the new fear.

In case you're not being hyperbolic (or for anyone else legitimately thinking this because I've heard it multiple times), I think Valve really did the best thing they could. I know Valve feels huge, but MasterCard and Visa together are over a hundred times bigger, and any payment processing system Valve could make would definitely be a pushover.

Also, never underestimate the casual normie population. If Valve lost Visa and MasterCard support, I'm pretty sure that would mean losing two-thirds of their playerbase if not more. Those people would either prop up alternative stores like Epic or Microslop's or just pull away from PC gaming altogether.

Anyway, it's a bit like the people saying Valve should make their own DRAM to combat the shortage. It doesn't acknowledge how entrenched the existing manufacturers are and how far away Valve actually is from that level of manufacturing.

Would you pay the same price for a Microsoft controller if it had little pads?

If it had all the other little things like TMR sticks, repair-friendly construction, really deep configuration, and other hardware in the family having a track record of good software support, unironically yes. As much as I hate Microsoft, their accessibility controller was a big win.

Also, it's not simping to genuinely like a company's products after using a lot of them.

To add to what the other reply said, developer verification comes with the implication that Google reserves the right to refuse verification. There are also legitimate reasons a developer might not even want to attempt to verify with Google to begin with. Admittedly, the vast majority of Android users probably don't use software from outside the Google Play Store, but it's a right they've always had and one Google is about to make much harder to exercise or discover, hence a loss of true device ownership for everyone.

If you've only ever lived in ecosystems that only permit software installs via first-party means (think Apple or game consoles), this may not sound alarming. To those of us used to the software situation on PC, where you can freely run any software as long as it exists, this feels like a major hit to software freedom.

I think it's because it's filled with competent people who genuinely like what they do. I definitely see that in their hardware division at least. Money isn't so corrupting if it's a tool to enable what you do and not the focus.

Funnily enough, I find NYC and Tokyo to be the least masturbatory targets for off-world interest.

NYC makes sense as a combined seat of international politics (see the UN building), economic power (largest GDP by city and Wall Street seeing 2/3rds of all public trade), and genetic representation for humanity (Queens being the most ethnically and linguistically diverse urban area on the planet).

Tokyo makes sense as the world's most populous metropolitan area and highest GDP by metropolitan area.

So, aliens scanning the planet or the Internet or whatever and thinking "we need to go here first" for either location is believable to me in an objective sense.

It also helps that there is often some background lore adding to why a particular location is important, which also includes explanations for Earth itself being important on a cosmic scale, though how masturbatory those explanations feel is highly variable.