The new Steam Controller verdict is in: James likes it. And now it’s back out again, as Julian has also been poking and prodding at Valve’s made-for-PC controller ahead of its release on May the 4th. Has this second pair of hands dug up some disagreements, or will they join together in peace for all mankind, and/or gamepads? Find out as we give, for the first time since 2022, The Second Opinion.
James: Go on then, Julian. How many magnetic thumbsticks out of ten?
Julian: I’d say at least eight, but an eight-thumbed hand is as much body horror as my brain is willing to summon up this early in the morning. What I can say for sure is that the Steam Controller is now my go-to gamepad for the PC. I’ve been using various generations of Xbox gamepad with Steam since the Xbox 360 days, and this does everything those controllers do with a tonne of extra stuff thrown in.
I didn’t think it would be an obvious improvement when I first took it out the box. From the added height to the controller the trackpads bring, which makes it look more like a black square with dinky feet than a traditional gamepad, the Steam Controller looked like it would be heavy and awkward in my hands, but it’s surprisingly comfortable. I know in your review you say it’s maybe a little too light but I’ve not used the more premium controllers you compare it to and it’s virtually the same as my humdrum Xbox gamepads. Valve’s pad is 12g heavier and for that tablespoon of sugar, I get an internal battery that I’ve not had to recharge all week.
There was a moment when I first booted up a game where I noticed I have to stretch my thumbs a touch further to reach the sticks, but that sensation was forgotten in about five minutes. So, before we get into any of the added features of the Steam Controller, I think it does everything I would want from a basic gamepad just as well as what I’ve been using for years.
To your more experienced hands, is it a good like-for-like swap?
James: I yearn for the rubbery embrace of my Razer Wolverine V3 Pro’s grips, but the Steam Controller has it licked on actual function, and at nearly half the price. I do have an absolute boggo-standard Xbox Wireless Controller somewhere around here as well, but removing all thoughts of trackpads and charging pucks, I’d have the Steam Controller over that too. It’s just nicer – nicer thumbsticks, a more substantial D-pad, even quieter face buttons.
Then you move your thumb down an inch and oh look, it’s got trackpads, I can play Dota 2 and launch browsers and actually navigate those stupid launcher-inside-launchers that some games have without needing a mouse to hand. Even when I’m at a desk, and my most favouritest Logitech is right there, thumbing a pad without the Controller leaving my grasp feels like it’s sparing me some vast UX annoyance.
I did a bit of testing on a sofa as well, Steam Deck docked to my TV, though am I right in thinking the living room was your primary environment of Steam Controlling?
Julian: Yeah, since the Steam Machine was announced last year, I’ve been exploring getting PC games onto my television. I’ve had a Steam Link, one of Valve’s abandoned streaming boxes, for years, but never had the home layout that let it work to its best. That changed when I moved into my new place in January and I’ll have an article soon that shows why and how it’s made all the difference. But, in short, it means I’ve mainly used the Steam Controller from my sofa and it has been, for the most part, excellent.
As well as being a great gamepad, providing wonderful rumble while I’m playing Dirt Rally, it’s opened up a load of games I’d sworn off until recently – the thoroughly PC games that don’t get a look in on console.
For instance, Klei’s colony management game, Oxygen Not Included. I’d previously tried playing it on Steam Deck, but its busy UI crammed the small handheld’s screen. And, while some kind soul’s built a custom layout that maps most of your actions to the buttons on a standard gamepad, I still struggled to keep pace with all the action on the colony. There’s a pause button in the top left of the UI but tracking back and forth across the screen with a thumbstick was a fiddly faff. The sensitive trackpads on the Steam Controller helped for sure, but the real difference is the pair of Grip Sense sensors; they basically added two new buttons to a controller already covered with them.
I hopped into the Steam overlay and updated the Steam Controller’s settings to remap the left Grip Sense to pause, and the right Grip Sense to cycle through different game speeds. With that tweak, a game I could previously only play on desktop has become a great living room game. It genuinely feels like I’ve opened a door on a new set of games. I’ve been playing Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, Timberborn, Slice & Dice, and the all-important test of any controller Bejewelled 3. (It’s never had proper gamepad support on Steam and it’s easy to whip across the screen to select and drag gems with the trackpad.)
Have you been playing around with the gyro at all? It’s only that one use of the Grip Sense that’s factored into games for me so far.
James: I did, but mainly in shooters, because I have no imagination. On a per-person level, I think the success of both gyro controls and Grip Sense will depend on how well that person can fight off muscle memory – which in my case, is weakly. I kept instinctively pushing the right thumbstick to aim in Team Fortress 2 when I’d knowingly, willfully switched to gyro input mere moments earlier. And in games where I’d bound a Grip Sense sensor to a command, I’d keep accidentally activating it by absentmindedly adjusting my hands; having it as the jump button in STALKER 2 meant I was recreating the sensation of traversing Pripyat on a space hopper. All of that is hardly the Controller’s fault, though, and I’m absolutely going to keep looking for ways that Grip Sense can work for me.
Did you have any technical hiccups with pairing the Steam Controller to the Steam Link? Proper coming-together of new and old, that.
Julian: It’s like you’re trying to pull the Steam Link Life feature out of me that I’ve been promising you for weeks. Well played.
It was exceedingly easy. I thought I’d need to have the Steam Controller’s charging/wireless receiever puck plugged into my desktop and hope there wasn’t much lag when using the controller over Bluetooth in the other room, but I plugged the receiver into one of the USB ports on the Steam Link and it worked immediately without any fiddling. I know Valve built the Steam Controller with the Steam Machine and Steam Frame in mind, but it (sadly) thrills me that it works with their older kit.
That said, I have had a couple of hiccups. None are things that suggest a mechanical break, such as that rumble ping you’ve been hearing while playing Silksong; they’re more bugs that come from a new piece of hardware interacting with thousands of games that weren’t built with it in mind. When I was playing Timberborn, for instance, I had to enter the name of my town into a text box, but despite trying to use the onscreen keyboard from the Steam Controller, none of the text inputted. For that, I had to go next door to type it in on the desktop.
Another instance where the pad wasn’t as smooth as it could be was in Half-Life 2. Sorry, Valve. Gordon Freeman’s jaunt in City 17 has had controller support for ages and the Steam Controller works almost all of the time, except when I try to quit the game; for some reason, while thumbsticks can navigate the screen, the trackpad isn’t active:
Have you run into anything in the games you’ve been playing? Or things you hope Valve update or add in the future?
James: Betrayal from within! I don’t know if I’d call the vibration chirp in Silksong a breakage – I haven’t been able to replicate it in any other game so it could just be a squishable firmware bug. Wouldn’t complain if either Valve or Team Cherry stepped on it, mind.
It’ll be worth doing something like a six-months-on reappraisal, in case something comes up that didn’t in my fortnight of reviewin’ time, but that’s really all I got in terms of clearly unintended whoopsies. I do wish it would play nicer with non-Steam launchers, to the point where I’d advise against the Steam Controller for anyone who spends a lot of time on Game Pass. Manually forcing games to launch through Steam, thus bringing them under the glow of Steam Input compatibility, is a viable workaround for pretty much everything else, but it’s weird that this device which makes PC life easier in so many ways also creates such admin work. But then, I don’t have enough technical understanding about how the Controller communicates with Windows to know if that can be changed with over-the-air updates.
Julian: I am a terrible business analyst and so any predictions I make should be immediately laughed out of the room, but I do wonder if the Steam Controller will end up being the most impactful of the three devices Valve is releasing.
James: I disagree on grounds of Steam Wishlist rankings, but also my prediction accuracy record on RPS is legendarily crap, so continue.
Julian: I was initially most excited for the Steam Machine, but as we’ve gone deeper into the RAM-pocalypse, RAMnarök, the RAM of days, and the potential price tab on the living room PC has leapt higher, I see less and less reason to buy one – especially as I’m in the lucky position of having a powerful desktop I won’t be upgrading for a while. The Steam Frame, meanwhile, sounds like a great VR headset, but as much fun as I’ve had playing with those, it doesn’t sound like it will let me do anything substantially different to what other VR headsets can do.
You say this in your review, but the Steam Controller feels like a proper made-for-PC gamepad. If it sells well and wide, as a Valve product might, I want to know what that might mean for support from developers in the future. The Xbox controller brought a baseline to what gamepad controls PC games should feature, I wonder if the Steam Controller can advance that.
Though, and I’m only saying it here because there wasn’t a good spot earlier, I do hope Valve add a headphone jack or a Digital-to-Analogue Converter to future pads. If I’m going to be playing PC games on my TV late into the night, I want to be able to plug some headphones in and make a little less noise for my neighbours.
How’s that for a second opinion, James?
James: It’s certainly second, I’ll give you that.