Valve wants to crowd-source the Steam Controller’s design

Valve is all about fan service. And with “over 125 million active users” in its Steam base, that’s a lot of varying expectations to meet. This month, the secretive Bellevue, Washington-based video game developer (Portal, Half-Life) is about to finally bring to market a suite of its Steam Machines, a console-like living room solution for its PC-gaming base. The hardware rollout’s been a long time coming for Valve — the original Steam Machine announcement was made back in September 2013 — but at least one aspect of it has been very public: the evolution of the Steam Controller. And its design is about to, quite literally, be put in the hands of consumers. “Anytime we’ve let the community get involved in the construction, the creation, the modification of things we’ve created, it always worked out fantastically,” says Valve designer Robin Walker, speaking at the company’s headquarters. “It was always better. It would be utterly bizarre if, for some reason, that wasn’t the case for hardware.”