GoKawiilAfter months of waiting, Valve has released its first piece of hardware since the Steam Deck OLED: the Steam Controller, a gamepad that takes the versatile mix of inputs from the best handheld gaming PC and lets you play games on your TV using any device that runs Steam.That includes gaming PCs, Macs, Steam Decks, and, one day, the Steam Machine and Steam Frame .
But the Steam Controller is releasing ahead of the latter two devices, and into a market where Xbox controllers dominate gaming on the couch. Even Sony's DualSense controllers have great support on a PC. But, according to Valve, they don't match what you can do on the Steam Deck, and they say people want that.
The Steam Controller came from the fact that Steam Deck users were using their handhelds in a variety of ways, including docking on a TV. Those people couldn't have the same inputs as they do on the Steam Deck. Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais told Tom's Hardware that the controller, and its ability to play all sorts of games designed for a keyboard and mouse on a controller, made for a "logical next step."
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Building the Controller
"We got some feedback that while they really appreciated having the same exact experience with respect to the UI and being able to get in and out of their games quickly and all, that docking a Deck meant missing some of the inputs, right?" said Griffais. "And so I think the Steam Controller is a great experience for that. You have all the same inputs that you're familiar with. It's pretty much the exact same layout as the Deck, with a bunch of improvements on it, but also just for, you know, just PC as a whole. "
Among other controllers, like what you get from Xbox and PlayStation, the Steam Controller sits in a sort of middle ground. It has more features than a standard Xbox controller, for instance, but doesn't have the physical customizability — think replaceable thumbsticks and hair-trigger locks — like a more expensive Xbox Elite Controller or PlayStation DualSense Edge .
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
"We wanted it to be natural," Steve Cardinali, a mechanical engineer on the Controller team, told Tom's Hardware. "You're playing a game on your Steam Deck, and you go sit on your couch, you play it on Controller, it feels similar."
That, he said, kept the feature set largely down to what is on the Steam Deck, minus the addition of Grip Sense, which can detect when you're holding the controller and effectively be used as a virtual button. Cradinali said that was added for the growing number of gyro users in competitive games, who need a tool for "ratcheting," or activating, disabling, or toggling gyro for motion controls.
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