It sounds like you're defining "hardcore gamer" as a competitive professional or semi-professional gamer. If so, I guess that's fine, but irrelevant to whether

It sounds like you're defining "hardcore gamer" as a competitive professional or semi-professional gamer. If so, I guess that's fine, but irrelevant to whether Valve will sell a lot of controllers. That's just not an important demographic. Much more important is the platform market share for hardcore games, like CoD and Battlefield. It simply isn't true that people prefer the PC version [1], despite the inferior controls. CoD sells vastly more copies for console than for PC [2]. It's not even close. If Valve wants to break into that market and compete with Xbox and PS, it needs a controller. [1] Though I do, and it sounds like you do too. [2] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31995/Exclusive_Black_Ops_For_Xbox_360_Sells_Nearly_5_Million_In_US.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31995/Exclusive_Black_Ops... (I recognize this doesn't include Steam sales, but the point still stands)