Valve's "VR touchdown" - DAY 2

Well this is it, we've made it to the day preceeding the date of the deckard announcement. With nothing being announced today it seems that tomorrow will be a day consisting one big blowout reveal. That likely leaves next week open for unexpected surprises - although that's a whole different thread of speculation.

I must correct my last blog post, Valve did in fact announce something yesterday...

This!

" Surprise. "

If it makes you feel any better it has, as expected, taken over the Steam animal fest frontpage, showing that Valve is not afraid of interrupting current sales/events to announce their own stuff.

If I were to speculate on the crumb of new information here, I would say Valve has these two weeks scoped out in this fashion:

Day 1 - Crossover: Dota ☓ Monster Hunter

Day 2 (we are here!) - Small breather after niche, but substantial announcement

Day 3 - Deckard announcement

Day 4-5 - Press embargo lifts, interviews and software rolls out, Arm64 client published

Day 6-8 - Large breather after big announcement

Day 9 - HLX announced, "runs great on Steam Frame!"

Day 10-12 - Another wave of press coverage, ridiculous amounts of interviews with all corners of Valve. Potential for some "sleeper agents" that have moved on from the Half-Life franchise at a younger age will be activated across all types of industries to make this covered at "new GTA release" levels of importance.

Think of a "This nearly 30 year old video game franchise has finally recieved a long awaited direct sequel to a 21 year old entry in its series and has set the internet on fire"-type of deal.

And following that you have the multi-week break between announcement and release, I would imagine Valve will line things up such that deckard ships simultaneously with the HLX release.

I'm at this stage not going to act like there's a substantial likelyhood that nothing happens, the way I see it - we're at a tipping point. It can no longer be argued in good faith that the deckard will not release and it makes a lot of sense for HLX to follow shortly after it's hastily appoaching announcement, the reasonable discussion to be had is about the execution of the announcement rather than the existance of it.

Given I've discussed the deckard and its release schedule now - I think it makes sense to give some attention to one of its undiscussed and, on the whole, less talked about accessories.

Triton

Triton is the successor to the infamous Steam Controller, its layout being based on the Steam Deck, carries a lot of elements from it's older brother and mixes them into a duke sized array of inputs. Even though the information we have on the Triton is limited, we can make a lot of assumptions based on the unfinished models we do have as many of its features are obvious to anyone familiar with the products it's based on.

The controller will inherit the front facing inputs of the deck and seemingly is aiming to be the "Steam Deck without a screen" that a vocal majority of the community has been asking Valve about for a while.

The original Steam Controller was in many respects too early for its time, gamers had not yet recognized the potential of gyro input, it's trackpads' haptic feedback were not good descriptive sellers and had to be felt to be believed. It was a product that only demoed well in hands-on scenarios which made for an uphill battle on Valve's digital storefront.

Said product is now 10 years old.

At this point gyro has proven itself, the trackpads have gained an audience through the Steam Deck and most gamers on the whole are a lot more open to alternate control schemes, gyro integration into both games and steam have progressed greatly since the Steam Controller's release and we've a good few talented individuals have shown some truly mouse competitive performance through gyro on DualSense controllers.

The next step is for Valve to make the definitive peripheral in this space, there's so much room for improvement currently with how scattered the current options are for good gyro capable controllers. For a company like Valve to step in with a controller dedicated to the PC space that integrates natively with far and away the most popular gaming platform and offer the first party support it deserves could generate ripples across the industry.

Think of how much The Big Three console vendors have stagnated in their controller designs, there's a space for innovation that the Triton can properly fill and this time it might actually go through due to a greater chance of the hardware's overall success.

With the deckard, Valve will once again remind people of its presence in the hardware space and the triton (if it succeeds in execution!) will be another saturating force in that reminder.

24 hours away from the deckard I began writing this post, not long from now we will finally see this thing in full color and get to know what the future of Valve Software will look like in the coming years.

In the meantime, this is where I get off.