Home • Death of a gamepad Craig Pearson Contributor 12th December 2019 / 9:00AM Right now, there’s a room in Buffalo Grove, Illinois that’s as quiet as a grave. The power is off, the robotic limbs are becalmed, and the once thumping presses are depressed. The Steam Controller assembly room is assembling no more, and with the recent Steam sale clearing out all the stock, the grand experiment is over. It’s the final part of Valve’s great Steam Machines undertaking to be shut down. They’d hoped to convince you to have a PC in the living room, or a small box for you to stream your library from your main PC. The Steam Machines never took off, the Steam Link box was discontinued a year ago, and now the Steam Controller will no longer be made. Gone, but not forgotten. The Steam Controller made a fan out of me. It freed me from my PC a little, and made me enjoy joypads again. All of them, not just Valve’s. I now own three Steam Controllers, and a pair of official Xbox One and PS4 pads, and it’s all down to Gabe’s big-eyed, owlish experiment. It had an impossible task. It…