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Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

The "Steam Box" era won't/can't begin until Steam is actually delivering the "all gamepad" experience that living-room users expect.

And that sounds like it's further away than hardware that hits any particular place on the price/performance/heat/noise spectrum.

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Actually, I've found a good amount of support for gamepads in Steam already. When they rolled out the Big Picture mode beta several months ago, games already started adding in controller support. Games that hadn't updated in years (Audiosurf) updated to add controller support. It's not completely universal, but it seems pretty good so far. Additionally, if they build in something like Joy2Key into the Steam Box hardware, it may be easier than you'd think.

Yes, but where gamepads are already supported, it's more the rule than the exception that you're going to run into menus and things that can't be negotiated via the gamepad.

(e.g. Windows UAC prompts, menus, pop-ups or text boxes that inexplicably demand kb/m input, etc. )

So it's not as if one flips the power on and sits on their couch with just a gamepad and has a console-style experience.

I kind of hope not, the biggest draw for me of playing PC/Steam games vs just playing console games is the deep strategy games available on Steam. Trying to play those with a controller? No thanks!

You could support both control schemes in one game, but then how do you make it so that the gamepad players don't get frustrated when playing against those with a keyboard and mouse?

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