While Valve is handing off some of the reins to third parties when it comes to console manufacturing, it looks like the Seattle-based software behemoth is the only company that will make your Steam controllers .
Valve's Greg Coomer explained to IGN that the company felt it was necessary to manufacture the controllers itself, as that was the best way Valve could ensure the overall design fit with the company's original goals.
“We want [Steam controllers] to have the attributes that we think are important, that allow people to play all the games on Steam, and we didn't think that it was really going to be possible to outsource the design for manufacturing and the finishing of the controller in a way that would allow third parties to take from us an idea or a reference design and bring it to market soon enough,” Valve told IGN. “We just think that, for now, at least, we have to do that ourselves. So we're going to be doing high volume production of the controller for ourselves.”
Coomer also admitted it wouldn't be easy to dive into the hardware business, and doesn't expect Steam controller sales to yield much of a profit.
“We think we are disadvantaged when it comes to cost,” Coomer said. “We're making a lot of decisions that are not actually optimized for cost. We're not going to lose money when we go make the controller. We have enough confidence around that, that we've thought through the manufacturing. But we're also not looking at it the same way that typical hardware manufacturers would look at it.”
