I actually hate it. I loved the round touchpads the most about steam controller V1. Honestly I just want an updated version of the V1 with better build quality and a swappable rechargable battery.
Honestly, even at the low render, it looks solid. Maybe a little concerned about the track pad placement and potentially hitting it with the heel of my hand, maybe.
By far my biggest gripe with the steams deck is hitting the trackpads with the palms of my hands. I usually disable them when playing a shooter like doom because otherwise the trackpads override my aim.
I'm worried they're treating the touchpad as secondary. I wanted them to be the main focus, at least on the right side, I hate joystick camera movement...
I mean, the trackpads don't have to control mouse cursors. They can be made to do pretty much anything, up to building action sets for a variety of key presses.
I was really looking forward to this, but the render doesn't seem like something I'd be interested in.
I need a Xbox style stick layout or my thumbs run into it each other, and I feel like those TouchPads are gonna get touched accidentally when using the sticks
We'll see, I'll probably still get one to try it out, getting tired of bumpers breaking and can see utility in the track pads, especially with steam controller configuration madness possible
Be rest assured that the same complaints were talked about the Steam Deck itself, and since I own one and have some decently sized hands, I can assure you that Valve will do all they can to make sure it is just as comfortable as the Deck is to hold!
This is also coming from someone who found the Steam Controller cool, but I hated not having some normal thumb sticks for games that provide controller support built in.
All in all, I think this will be a beautiful merging of a normal controller with the touch pads being a huge plus for the Steam community to tinker with and release some amazing controller layouts, just like they do with the Deck!
If you're not sure of how useful the left trackpad is for not only scrolling in desktop mode or on older PC games, I would also like to mention that the Steam Community that you can use others layouts can sometimes make the left track pad so so so much more useful. I found a picture that shows just how many things you can fit into this useful part of the layout. I found out about it while I was playing some older games on the Deck with the help of the EmuDeck community.