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Despite all the hype and anticipation, the Steam Controller is not for everyone.
I’ll say up front that most people probably shouldn’t bother throwing A$149 at this when there are myriad standard, cheaper controllers on the market that serve the function perfectly. But if you’re someone who has a PC in the loungeroom and has to keep one of those awful Logitech keyboard/touchpad combos around for the odd times you need a mouse pointer, or you’ve fallen in love with the Steam Deck’s seemingly odd array of input options, then this thing might be right up your alley.
The Steam Controller has a bunch of interesting features and inputs, possibly more than I’ll ever find use for. It feels like a toolbox just waiting for the right situation for its pile of implements. On top of the standard analog sticks, which are TMR hall sensing, so they won’t drift over time like most other major controllers, and an array of d-pad, face buttons, and shoulder inputs, it has some extras you don’t often see. Dual touchpads dominate the face of the device, angled for easier use with a thumb. Four circular buttons sit on the rear of the handholds. It’s got gyro-based motion sensing, and even knows when either side is being held by a hand, and can use that as input.
No games are built to take advantage of any of this by default, since things are built to the more standard controller baseline. But, in the same way that Xbox Elite and DualSense Edge users have discovered, if you have the patience to map games to the newly provided inputs, you can find ways to improve your experience.
The customisation options are immense. Each of the trackpads can serve several uses. They can be giant buttons, or more standard mouse pointer controls, or Steam can surface a radial menu when they’re touched, with each option on the circle mapped to an in-game input. It can detect when you’re holding the left side of the controller, and use that to change the control setup. You could choose to only enable gyro aim controls when you let go of the right-hand side of the controller, if you wanted to.
Or you could just be simple like me and place the run button in Elden Ring on one of the back buttons, so your right thumb can be free for camera control while your character runs through The Lands Between.
It’s all a little overwhelming, to be honest, but there is a saving grace. Since the controller practically emulates the control scheme of a Steam Deck, and Steam Deck players have been building controller layouts for years at this point, for most games you want to play with this thing, there will be community layouts you can just download and apply to save you the hassle of designing and implementing one yourself. Even for games with full controller support, it can be nice to find that someone else thought of interesting ways to use the back buttons or touchpads to get an edge in play. This whole concept can come into its own, especially with older PC games that are designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard. Not all will work, of course, but sometimes the mouse and a selection of button/touchpad inputs can make for a decent enough way to play games away from the desk.
Comfort is an intensely personal thing, of course. Speaking for myself, though, I find the controller quite nice in the hand; more so than the Steam Deck it’s clearly based on. I very rarely use them, but I found the back buttons easy and natural to hit in a way the Deck’s equivalents aren’t. The top-heavy placement of the primary controls seems odd at first glance, but I haven’t found that it gets in the way of comfort in long play sessions at all. These buttons are top-heavy to make space for the aforementioned touchpads, but I found them easy to access without adjusting my grip, at least for the kinds of occasional use I had.
The controller can connect to your computer of choice over Bluetooth, a USB-C cable, or its supplied wireless receiver, which doubles as a magnetic charging pad. That receiver uses a genius, if well-trodden, idea that it’s on your desk as somewhere to easily charge, and by virtue of that, it’s generally closer to the controller, making for more reliable wireless transmission. That being said, I had no trouble using the controller even if the receiver was several rooms away, though it’s worth noting my house is not huge.
The magnetic charge is a fantastic idea, though implemented a little imperfectly in my opinion. The way it snaps up when you slide your controller over it is delightful, but it’s so light that detaching the controller from it is a two-hand affair. A minor gripe, but a little more weight in the charging puck might have made this feel nicer. I used the wireless receiver to play a whole bunch of Hades to really make sure that input latency wouldn’t be an issue, and if there was any latency, I couldn’t notice it.
One design decision by Valve, though, could be a deal breaker for some. The controller only works as a controller in games launched from within Steam. You can, of course, add outside games to Steam, and they will get to use the controller just fine, but not everyone wants to do this. When you’re not inside a Steam game, going through the Steam Input layer, the device functions as a mouse-trackpad and keyboard in a similar way to the Steam Deck in Desktop Mode.
For myself personally, I kind of like this decision. It means that if I’m ever in a desktop environment to install game mods or set up alternate game stores, then I can navigate the desktop well enough to avoid digging up the previously mentioned horrible keyboard/trackpad combo. It does, however, mean that if you prefer to launch games through Epic, Battle.net, locally installed standalone games, or really anything outside of the Steam interface, this controller is kind of useless. While I understand and agree with the decision they’ve made for my personal use case, I do wish there was an option for the controller to fall back to a standard XInput controller outside the Steam environment. It would make it applicable and useful to so many more situations.
I really like the Steam Controller, and for my specific setup, which is a Steam Deck that is sometimes docked to my TV to play on the big screen, it’s fantastic. I can more easily deal with the little quirks that come up with some of the old PC games I play, like config windows that appear outside of the game and need a mouse to navigate, but for people just looking for a really nice controller, I’m not sure this is the one. It’s absolutely a nice controller, made better by Valve’s commitment to repairability, but unless one of its unique features speaks to you and your needs, you’re probably going to have just as good a time with a standard console controller or one of the vast array of quality, cheaper controllers available for PC.
If you’ve come to love the unique features that Steam Deck has brought to the usability of PC games with its extra inputs and options, you’ll probably love this thing.
It’s a Steam Deck minus the Deck.