$60, has capacitive joysticks, gyro, steam menu buttons, and 4 extra buttons. Fully supported in Steam Input.
However, no track pads or vibration.
This is cool and all, but no rumble is kind of a deal breaker for me
Yeah, I was totally on board till I got to that part. What an absurd exclusion :/
yeah i don’t see why excluding rumble would be a deal breaker. is it an immersion thing?
$60 is a lot for two extra buttons and no vibration. Gyro is nice, if it actually works with games though.
I feel like they missed an opportunity by not replacing the d-pad with a track pad.
I think it has 4 extra buttons, in addition to the back buttons there are two extra buttons under the dpad and right thumb stick.
Those are the back pedals.
It has two extra Menu buttons. Not the most exciting thing in controller design.
Without all the features that actually made the Steam Controller great… yeah
I don’t understand how they got the official steam brand name, it’s just a mid-end controller with some major features missing.
Anyone know how good Hori’s d-pad is?
I still regularly use my original Steam Controller – for the trackpads. It allows me to do M+KB strategy gaming from the couch.
This lacks the killer feature, IMHO, given that I can use any of a wide variety of regular Bluetooth controllers for stuff with controller support.
What really sets the Steam Controller (and the Steam Deck’s control layout) apart from the market are the dual touchpads and dynamically/easily programmable buttons. The above just looks like a reskinned XBox controller, and, if I read the article right, it needs a “companion app” to get full functionality out of the controller.
I hope that they at least made sure that the companion app works on the Steam Deck.
Not having the touchpads is a big downside, but this still fills a huge niche that the others dont. My Xbox elite controller is cool and all, but has neither a gyro nor capacitive joysticks. My dualsense has a gyro, but no capacitive touch so I need to activate it with a button hold or leave it always on.
The Xbox and PS5 controller also don’t treat the paddles as independent buttons by default, so you need an extra layer of software on PC that allows mapping those buttons to arbitrary inputs. Steam Input can overwrite this sometimes, but it’s very inconsistent on a game + hardware basis. The companion app is a concerning “feature”. Hopefully it’s just marketing trying to make up a fancy phrase for “hardware driver”.
From what I understand, steam input has full support for it as well. As in it will show the controller in steam, and let you program back buttons/capacitive sticks/etc.
I think you only need the companion app if you aren’t using steam.
Edit:
