“So we have built up a good supply,” Valve engineer Steve Cardinali tells me just ahead the launch of the Steam Controller. Which is good news, because I’ve got a feeling this is a pad that’s going to be super popular with PC gamers and I’ve got to believe there is going to be some serious pressure on stock levels around the world.
Because that’s the thing here, this is a very different launch to the original Steam Deck, where availability was staggered globally. The Steam Controller is going on sale everywhere, all at once.
“We hope that a lot of people around the world really, really like it, and we sell a bunch of them,” Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve tells me. “That’s our hope. We’re optimistic. I’m optimistic.”
And having spent time with my own Steam Controller I can see why he is. There is so much to the Steam Controller, from its standard PC pad capabilities, to its haptics, to its gyro control, to its battery life, repairability, and of course, those trackpads. There’s also the fact the delayed Steam Machine has been so hyped and folk are so desperate to get their hands on some new Valve hardware, I can see people wanting to even just get a piece of the new techie triumvirate of Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame as soon as they can.
“We have built up a good supply of this,” Cardinali says when I ask about Valve’s ability to maintain stock levels for the Controller. “But it’s based on what we anticipate supply to be. And supply could be much larger than we anticipate. In which case our production has a finite limit on how much we can make. And we’ll do our best to keep up with demand if it greatly exceeds our expectations.”
“We have knobs,” interjects Yang.
“We have knobs we can turn to try to get things to people faster,” says Cardinali. “It’s complicated and you know the mass production machine is a big machine with a lot of momentum. So, depending on how it goes for the first chunk of time, if we have high demand and it stays high demand, there are things we can do to help alleviate that down the road.”
And what are those knobs?
“We do think we’ll have a good amount of stock around the world for the launch,” says Yang. “So and then, at the factory, if we’re like, ‘oh, we actually probably need to make more’ then we can turn that knob up and have them producing more.”
As ever with PC gaming, however, there is always the shadowy figure of lag getting in the way. And even if Valve is able to start turning knobs in the factory to up the production levels of its controller to cope with higher than anticipated demand, there will inevitably be a lag in getting those new pads into retail.
“We try to build enough wiggle room so that we can try not to be out of stock for a really long time,” notes Yang.
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