u/MarcusQuintus

As I've watched reviews of the Steam Controller, I've seen a lot of people who state that they don't use these features or find them necessary.

This feels about the same as using two analog sticks to navigate. When Alien Resurrection for the PS1 came out in 1997, critics complained about its dual analog stick controls, where the left stick moved the character and the right stick moved the player. 30 years later this is second nature and anyone not doing it is making a deliberate stylistic choice.

It's the same thing with gyro. It's such a better way to control the camera for aiming weapons than an analog stick that a good comparison is using 4 face buttons for camera control vs a stick. But it will take time for it to be properly implemented. Especially when only 1/3 of the console companies are really pushing it and 1/3 standard controllers don't even have it as an option.

Same goes for trackpads, which make strategy games playable in a way that they never have before, and the extra buttons on the back, which allow for further customization than we've had before, especially for those with movement limitations.

Nintendo is amazing at working around limitations to make great products, understanding what works and what doesn't. The Mario Land games show this off best.

1. Mario Land 1 is zoomed out to give you roughly the same ratio of character to level as Super Mario NES but at the cost of the visuals. Additionally, it's an adventure that spans the globe with varied gameplay and aesthetics to make the levels feel longer than they really are, where the original Mario Bros had mostly samey levels.

2. In Mario Land 2, they responded to feedback and made Mario bigger and more detailed, closer to his SNES counterpart, while making the game more expansive so it played more like Super Mario World; however, this came at the cost of making the gameplay more challenging as you now couldn't see as far even with Mario moving slower than he does in the home consoles.

3. In Mario Land 3, they slowed down the gameplay further and focused it even more on exploration instead of platforming but now it was too dissimilar to a classic Mario game, so they decided to make the protagonist Wario a character who liked hunting for treasure and was generally bigger.

It's a great showcase of how the company works: through light experimentation, turn limitations into strengths and change what isn't working.