Morgan Park
The perfect controller has: Symmetrical analog sticks, a D-pad that’s four buttons (not a pivot), analog triggers, quiet face buttons, and a weird feature you rarely use, but are glad to have.
This week, Valve released a $99 Steam Controller the general public was so excited to have that it sold out in 30 minutes, temporarily tanking its service in the process. It was the best selling product on Steam despite zero active players (dead device?). Not to brag about spending too much money on a controller I don’t strictly need, but I got one.
It arrived unceremoniously at my door and remained in its box for almost seven years. A few months ago, I finally cracked it open. Honestly, it shattered my expectations.
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To be fair, those expectations were pretty low. I’d heard for years that this thing is clunky and awkward to use. It’s obvious what people are referring to with those judgments, but so far that’s not my experience. It’s way more comfortable to hold than its ice-cream-scooped grips would suggest, and while the face buttons are too small and the stick is hard to press, overall it’s solid.
It’s also more useful to me now than it was when I bought it. Ever since I got a dock for my Steam Deck, the handheld has become my most-played living room “console”. I’ve primarily used a cheap 8BitDo pad so far, and while it’s great for 90% of my needs, it’s not a perfect arrangement. I’ve grown accustomed to the Deck’s onboard touchpads for menu-driven indies like Balatro, Case of the Golden Idol, and Mewgenics. The controller schemes for all of them are ugly work, and so is the prospect of stashing a wireless mouse and keyboard near my couch.
This is where the old Steam Controller is a star. It’s a wonderful secondary gamepad to have waiting in the wings for the right moment. The thumbpads are precise and spacious, and the mouse experience is even better than the Steam Deck. The shape and haptics go a long way for that, especially when using the left one as an iPod-style scroll wheel. It’s my new favorite way to play mouse-y games on a TV.
It didn’t help that Valve originally sold the controller not as a mouse-first device and or the best gyro-enabled option on the market, but as the only gamepad you’d need in the living room. That, it simply ain’t.
Never dead
What really blows me away is how well-supported this thing still is years after Valve ended production. Thanks to the tireless work of diehard users and Steam Input, no matter what game I throw at it, there’s an excellent chance that there’s already a touchpad/gyro-compatible layout waiting for me. Old or recent, it doesn’t seem to matter—Marathon already has a handful of community configs, as does Pragmata.
Steam sorts these layouts by popularity—you can see not only how many users have liked the control scheme, but how many thousands of hours have been played with it. That’s how I found a Balatro layout that’s better than the one I cooked up for myself on the Deck.
In a survey of my 32 installed games, 26 of them (81%) had community layouts. Would I actually use it for a majority of those games? Heck no, but options are a beautiful thing. I’ve never been a gyro guy, but playing an hour of Pragmata with a layout that activates gyro only while holding the left trigger felt really nice.
It’s a niche controller for sure, but honestly, not that niche anymore. The PC has finally found a permanent place in the living room, just not exactly the way Valve tried to do it a decade ago. That’s a future that needs good mouse options. I will never, ever use a mouse on the coffee table, but I will keep this old Steam Controller around. That is, if I can manage not to lose its required USB dongle. Come on Valve, you couldn’t have drilled a little slot for the dongle into the controller?
If you think a mouse-forward controller would also suit you, I wish I could say these are easy to find. You’ll see them pop up on Ebay regularly, but rarely at a price you can feel great about.
This exercise has clarified three things for me:
- Controllers are the most interesting gaming hardware there is
- We need more weirdo gamepads for uncommon but very real scenarios
- When one of those weirdo controllers is $5 brand new, it’s an impulse purchase you won’t regret
I apologize, old Steam Controller. I wasn’t familiar with your games.
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