Valve's Steam controller won't have a touchscreen after all

It's currently only in the hands of beta testers , but Valve has already decided that its Steam controller prototype won't be getting a touchscreen for its final release after all.

The announcement was made at the company's Steam Dev Days event in Seattle last night, where company co-founder Gabe Newell also revealed that Steam now has a whopping 75 million active users. Unfortunately the event is only open to developers, with no members of the press in attendance, but a steady stream of Steam Machine updates has been appearing on Twitter - chief among them images of the updated Steam Controller.

@TheIneQuation posted the above image, which shows the four central buttons of the beta controller removed and replaced with a directional pad and four face buttons. Apparently this is primarily for better backwards compatibility. According to SteamDB , the controller will use AA batteries rather than a rechargeable battery pack. [A HREF="https://twitter.com/galyonkin" target="_blank"]

Galyonkin[/A] posted another photo showing a 3D printed mockup.

Other small snippets of information revealed last night include the fact that up to 16 Steam controllers will work at the same time. Each one has integrated gyroscopes, although they have yet to be implemented in the software development kit (SDK), and biometrics are still being investigated as "the hands are not the best place to capture" this kind of data.

The mockup controller seen here isn't the final design and will most likely change again before the controller goes on sale. Valve plans to sell it at retail and through Steam, but has yet to reveal pricing or an estimated release date.