SAN FRANCISCO—On Wednesday, two months after the Rock Band game franchise sputtered back to life, the staff at music-game developer Harmonix confirmed to Ars Technica that an even bigger release is on its way. Rock Band 4 is coming, and according to Harmonix, it’ll launch on Playstation 4 and Xbox One by the end of 2015.

However, it wasn’t quite the announcement event we were hoping for. Quite frankly, we were bummed to walk into a Harmonix meeting room and not see a single plastic guitar or drum set to muck around with, let alone even a hint of new Rock Band gameplay.

The reason? “We gotta get ahead of a lot of things first,” Harmonix product manager Daniel Sussman told Ars. “We’re out earlier than we have been in games past, talking about a release, to address the questions that everyone will have about their content, their hardware.”

Sam Machkovech

The “final” version of the Steam Controller.

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SAN FRANCISCO—Enough press releases, enough GDC teases. On Wednesday, Valve Software finally unveiled a full range of Steam Machines, along with the “final” Steam Controller, the Steam Link streaming box, and even the SteamVR hardware. We’ll soon talk at length about our half-hour demo with SteamVR, composed of six distinct, interactive demos, but for now, we’ll recap our impressions of the rest of Valve’s hardware spread.

Valve Software confirmed that we tested the “final” version of the Steam Controller, which received a November 2015 release window in an announcement yesterday. That final design includes two touchpads (with the left one having a d-pad shape etched onto it), a back panel that can be clicked down with middle fingers on both sides, a single joystick—finally—and an Xbox-style spread of face buttons and shoulder buttons. The above gallery has captions with some thoughts on the controller’s features, including the new GameCube-like triggers.

SteamOS includes a few Steam Controller tweaking pages.

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We demoed three games, all of which launched with WASD-and-mouse control schemes on PC: The Talos Principle, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and the new, in-development version of Unreal Tournament. In all three, Kyle and I still struggled to feel competent with the right-hand touchpad as a mouse replacement. We played against easiest-difficulty bots in the latter two games and could barely line up solid gunshots most of the time. It’s one thing to say we’ll “get used to it” after more time with the controller—the increased speed and “momentum roll” of swiping the touchpad seem like features that will really pay off for people who get used to the Steam Controller—but the bots we faced practically stood still most of the time, and we’re not that bad at first-person shooters.

On Tuesday, Valve Software continued its Game Developers Conference-related trickle of news by confirming scant details on a variety of initiatives. In addition to a few more details about SteamVR and a previously unannounced living-room streaming box, dubbed Steam Link, the company confirmed that its 11-year-old graphics engine, Source, will finally receive an upgrade in the form of the Source 2 engine.

The Source 2 news, which came via press release, confirmed that the engine would be made available to all budding game and graphics developers for free, and that it would receive a Vulkan-compatible build (previously known as Next Generation OpenGL). However, the news was otherwise incredibly light on details, meaning no license-cost information, no release date, and no new or upcoming games attached to the engine.

The original version of Source has powered every Valve-developed game since 2004’s Counter Strike: Source, and Valve has previously dodged questions about an updated engine by claiming that the engine had been iterated on to adapt to newer computer and graphics solutions.