14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has confirmed that for the Steam Controller it's going to supervise production itself, instead of partnering with a more experienced hardware manufacturer.
Valve has a traditionally open strategy in concern to its current projects, fact highlighted by the Steam Machines initiative, which sees different computer companies create their own configurations that will be sold under the Steam banner.
With the Steam Controller, however, Valve wants exclusive control at least at first, so that it can oversee all the stages of the gamepad's creation and production.
"The controller is going to be a Valve product. We’re going to manufacture it. We’re going to supply all the people who are making third party Steam Machines with controllers," Valve's Greg Coomer told IGN.
"It’s not really because we’re super anxious to get in the hardware business and we think it’s the best way to turn 90 degrees and start racing toward success in hardware and making money in that way. It’s really because we want the controllers to exist."
Valve is also a bit weary of ideas being borrowed from other companies after working on the Steam Controller.
"We want them to have the attributes that we think are important, that allow people to play all the games on Steam, and we didn’t think that it was really going to be possible to outsource the design for manufacturing and the finishing of the controller in a way that would allow third parties to take from us an idea or a reference design and bring it to market soon enough."
What's more, seeing as how it will handle production, it won't necessarily push for a high profit margin on the new device.
"We’re making a lot of decisions that are not actually optimized for cost. We’re not going to lose money when we go make the controller. We have enough confidence around that, that we’ve thought through the manufacturing. But we’re also not looking at it the same way that typical hardware manufacturers would look at it," he added.
300 Steam Controllers and Machines will be shipped to lucky users from around the world in the near future for testing purposes. The final designs will be on sale sometime next year.