Here’s a detailed look at the alleged next iteration of Valve Corporation’s Steam Controller, the Steam Controller 2.
Known Valve leaker SadlyItsBradley took to Twitter/X to reveal a detailed render of the Steam Controller 2. He mentioned that while the image is AI-generated, it was trained on a real image he has of the new game pad. He refrained from sharing the actual picture, as it may have revealed potentially sensitive information from his source.
Steam Controller 2 Design
The aforementioned render of the Steam Controller 2 revealed by the Valve insider can be seen below.
According to SadlyItsBradley, the Steam Controller 2 can detect how far a user’s hands are from the handles using a simple capsense feature. Similar to the Valve Index controllers, though it doesn’t support full finger tracking in the grips.
Previously, the same insider discovered a minimalist Steam icon of the Steam Controller 2 via a datamine of a recent back-end update. The presence of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file in the database suggested that Valve may be closing in on an official announcement for the rumored successor to its first game pad. He referred to an earlier leak from Djundik, creator of SteamDB, which revealed concept designs for the Steam Controller 2. According to the aforementioned leak, the new game pad is internally referred to as “ibex” at Valve. As for how Djundik images were leaked, he mentioned that Valve had set “freetodownload” on the SteamVR app in order to grant access to anonymous accounts. This made all the depots accessible, and one of the depots included content for the VR headset and controllers (codemamed deckard/roy).
Going by the leaked images, the Steam Controller 2 comes with a pair of analog sticks, a pair of trackpads, a dpad, eight face buttons, and four shoulder buttons. It likely also comes with rear buttons. The analog sticks are symmetrical and their placement is similar to that of the Nintendo Switch Pro controller.
