Valve has today revealed the Steam Controller, a gamepad designed to work with its SteamOS-powered Steam Machine consoles announced earlier this week.

The company spent a year experimenting with designs for the controller. "We realized early on that our goals required a new kind of input technology — one that could bridge the gap from the desk to the living room without compromises," Valve explains.

Instead of regular analogue sticks or a d-pad, the controller features two circular, clickable trackpads. Valve claims the trackpads approach the input resolution of a desktop mouse, and allow the entire library of Steam games on PC to be comfortably played in the living room.

Older games which are not designed for a gamepad will be "fooled" into seeing the controller as if it were a mouse and keyboard, using custom bindings.

"Whole genres of games that were previously only playable with a keyboard and mouse are now accessible from the sofa," Valve suggests, pointing to real-time strategy, 4X space exploration, and simulation games as examples.

Each trackpad features "super-precise" haptic feedback, which Valve claims is a generation ahead of the rumble technology currently used in console controllers. "It is a higher-bandwidth haptic information channel than exists in any other consumer product that we know of."

In the centre of the controller is a high-resolution touch screen, which replaces keyboard input. "The screen allows an infinite number of discrete actions to be made available to the player, without requiring an infinite number of physical buttons," writes Valve. The touch screen will be programmable by developers and could display a scrolling menu of action buttons, a radial dial, or be used like the Wii U gamepad displaying secondary information such as a map.

To avoid forcing players to look down at the controller to use the touch screen, the display is overlaid on top of the game on the TV when the player touches the screen. In addition, the entire touch screen is clickable, and a click is required to commit a selected action on the screen.

The Steam Controller is designed to be hackable, and Valve wants its community of users and developers to participate in the design.

Prototype Steam Machines and Controllers will be delivered to 300 beta testers later this year, with the final product planned for sale in 2014.