Would you spend $40-$60 on crafting buttons for your Steam Deck? What if they were hand poured from custom resin molds, made by just one person in the USA?
These Steam Deck custom resin buttons look great – and are for sale
I imagine it would depend on what it looks like, but fortunately it looks like it surprising.
Today, Greg Leddy is pursuing his TouchProtect touchpad, button skins, and custom painted colored controllers with his new DeckButtons.com, a store that exclusively sells buttons and D-pads for your Steam Deck. Each one is cast in a custom two-part silicone mold of their own design, which is self-created from a 3D printed key button out of resin and hand sanded and finished to mimic the Steam Deck’s slightly sandblasted shell texture.
Liddy sent me two complete sets of his buttons, and they look like the real deal. Not that I can light it up as elegantly as he does in the photos he provided:
Even though they come in a variety of more understated colors like neon pink, blue, yellow, purple, and red, as well as sparkly purple and black, I can’t bring myself to spend any of the real estate in this story on anything but a limited-edition Holo collection. .
I especially love Easter eggs: check out a slide outlet The cake I spotted on the back of the new select button:
If you are interested in these custom buttons, here are a few things you should know:
First, you should be comfortable looking around for your gadgets! Even just swapping out a D-pad meant removing 20 screws and two panels and disconnecting five ribbon cables. Fortunately, these bars are more forgiving than the ones on the Nintendo Switch. Here is the installation guide — Don’t forget to remove your SD card before opening anything.
Second, don’t expect these buttons to do that Feel a lot Better, beyond the sturdier feel on the D-pad and some tactile bumps on the quick-access and menu keys. You’re still hitting essentially the same membrane-covered keys inside the deck.
Third, as you can see in the image below, there is a small visible gap to the left of the d-pad. This already exists with Valve’s original soft D-pad as well, but because it’s a black pad on top of a black surface inside a black cavity, it’s much less noticeable.
Oh, and you may need to sand the edge of the one-button shaft if you’re using an aftermarket ExtremeRate casing.
Again, Liddy is just one person, and it’s not clear how many of those he intends to sell. But he says he has expanded in the past to meet demand, hiring help when necessary. TouchProtect sold about 23,000 units on Amazon last year. He also told me that he would switch from buy buttons to pre-order buttons on his website if there was too much demand.
Hollow buttons may not be around forever — they “take longer to do, so you can’t make many of them at once before the resin cures,” he says, but he plans to add shiny resin buttons that have nifty things encapsulated inside, like control keys. Steam. He also works on a cold-cast brass D-pad: “real brass powder infused with resin that can be painted.” He sent me a sample: looks neat, but I still prefer the hologram.
