Valve launches the Steam Controller without the Steam Machine

Last November, Valve introduced the world to its new vision of living room gaming: the Steam Machine and Steam Controller. Then, RAMageddon. Memory shortages forced Valve to delay all its hardware and reset expectations.

Now, Valve is releasing the Steam Controller without the Steam Machine.

The Steam Controller is officially going on sale May 4th at 1PM ET for $99 USD, $149 CAD, $149 AUD, £85 in the UK and €99 in the EU. We’ve already spent two weeks with the pad paired to our Steam Decks and gaming desktops, and you can read reviews from my colleagues Jay Peters and Cameron Faulkner right now. It’s pretty great!

What about the Steam Machine living room console and Steam Frame headset? Valve is simply saying stay tuned. “Right now we don’t have any updates on that, but we’re hard at work on it, and we hope to have news soon,” Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge. Valve previously committed to ship the Machine and Frame this year.

You do not need a Steam Machine to use the new Steam Controller. It should work with any computer that runs Steam, and as a generic controller for phones too. People have been asking for a successor to the cult classic original Steam Controller, or rather the Steam Deck’s controls shrunk down into a gamepad, ever since the Deck came out. Some Verge readers got pretty excited in 2022 when Valve’s hardware team revealed it would enjoy making that dream come true.

Now, Jay writes that the Steam Controller does almost exactly what he’d hoped — he’s playing Steam Deck on the TV, with a more comfortable pad, that keeps his controller profiles and muscle memory intact.

The delay for Valve’s other hardware does mean that our Steam Controller reviews feel slightly incomplete. We couldn’t test how well the Steam Controller works with the Steam Machine’s dedicated controller antenna, or how well the Controller works in virtual reality with the Steam Frame. (The controller is a visible object in VR thanks to built-in infrared LEDs that the headset cameras can track.)

But we like what we see, and we got a few additional tidbits of information from Valve, too:

Lastly, if you’re wondering whether you’ll ever be able to buy a Steam Deck again, Griffais says Valve is “working hard on trying to address that,” but it’s challenging because “the world is a different place than it was last year.”