I just want to let you know that when I was director of production at a multimedia studio, one of the rules in my ux design “bible” was that an interface must never present an “are you sure” prompt to a Quit action. Yes there were fights over it.
I have a lifetime boycott of all things Ubisoft for this very reason. I bought game after game after game from the late 90’s until early 2000’s. 100% of them were legal purchases and with the CD in the drive… "please insert CD " error
Then I became the lead developer for gameloft.com and saw how completely incompetent the French leadership of the company is. Absolute morons to the highest levels.
Never another penny shall be conveyed to Ubi from my holdings.
edit: You wanna know what I’m talking about? Ok. They import the director from France. He does not speak English, he does not speak Quebecois, which is very different than Parisian French. He has no knowledge of the games industry whatsoever, but is a cherished family friend. He cannot communicate with anybody in written or verbal ways. He shows up for work at 10am and takes 2 hour coffee with other “leadership” and then lunch. Then he comes back from a 2 hour lunch, and him and come C-Level turnip laugh at his Billy Bass for 30 minutes. I am not making any of this up. This man installs a friend he met into the position of Executive Producer. The man’s previous experience was managing an Esso gas station. No embellishment. So I’m the Sr dev and I’m the fucking acting director, account manager, game designer, executive producer, producer, technical producer, project manager, director of production, developer, creative director, QA lead, every god damned thing just to get some corny-ass games produced.
edit2: Laughing at a Billy Bass. A Billy. Bass. Singing. Fish. Laughing at it uproariously.
Straight up answer which yes, will sound confrontational, but it is made in a blustery manner to drive home the point: People who want games tuned to what they need in terms of difficulty are the same kind that go to a Vietnamese restaurant and complain that spaghetti or chicken nuggies aren’t on the menu. “Why would you deprive a paying customer food they’re willing to pay for??”
That’s what it comes down to. The game wasn’t made for you to unwind. It was made with intentional choices made for other people to play and feel the experience of surmounting challenge.
Atari Warlords. After seeing it in the local convenience store, I raced home on my bike to describe what I’d seen to my incredulous mother. She took me back and let me play twice. The obsession took root right at that moment.
Then later, Section Z in the arcades - It was the game that made me ponder how games were actually made. I imagined a person sitting with a microphone patched into the back of the arcade cabinet: “Ok I want a little red guy with a gun and he runs sideways…”
It failed because it offered too much customization. Really.
Physical construction was shit tier. I should know, I early adopted November 2015 and in total I went through 17 not counting the 3 DOA. My ear actually became attuned to the specific mini-crunch that signaled the impending demise of a shoulder button.
It also had undeniable layout and design issues. The D-Pad they implemented was a joke. Fanboys wouldn’t shut up about it but truth is, it was completely unacceptable to put a track pad in it’s place and it was more or less unusable. Other buttons and inputs were juuuuust a little cramped or off-kilter and it was common to input mash accidentally.
The configuration software was also a nightmare. Ever try setting up a Mouse Region for a twin stick game? Sweet jeebus. They tripled the efficiency of the configuration screens in recent updates and it’s still a nightmare. It’s 30 inputs just to tweak something like a deadzone, then you have to menu out… then test in game… then drill allllll the way back down to tweak a little more.
But back to my assertion at the top. It made SC gamers literally unfairly better. Gryo aiming, effectively programmable macros, mode shifts, radial wheels, action layers, targeted mouse clicks, button toggles, sliders, regions, I can’t even remember it all from back before it got heavily neutered. It got out of control to the point where you could bypass “cheating” standards and macros in big online games, etc. You could simulate inputs.
Design iterations would have fixed the other issues, but it became a deadly-unfair device for competitive gaming and a lot of companies hated how the Steam Controller hardware and software customization… basically allowed people to “cheat” their systems in a sense. It opened a huge fucking can of worms. Something like it will probably never be seen again for these reasons.
Hell, they are almost designed to break. They are utterly shabby in terms of build quality.
I was one of the early adopters going back to November 2015
I am not lying when I tell you I have been through 17 of these controllers. It’s the right bumper almost every time.
I have a giant handful of the dongles. I was saving them thinking they would go up in value but now like $2 knockoffs are available LOL
Edit: the first one I received, out of the box, had a broken face button membrane. The replacement I received had a non-functioning back right paddle. The replacement for that had a non-functioning R shoulder and you could hear the plastic crunching on each press. That’s just the first three I received and I’m not counting those in the 17 that I destroyed in my own hands.
They were built like absolute shit. After the first run got sold and they shored-up manufacturing problems, they got marginally better but the fundamental underlying issue never was solved.
If it wasn’t such a wonderful controller, I would have stomped the first one into powder and never looked back.