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Steam Controller (2026) - PCGamer Review (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 5 days ago by simple@piefed.social to c/games@lemmy.world
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[-] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

I call bullshit on that. The OG controller also "doesn't work outside of steam" and "requires steam for full functionality", but two weeks after lunch we already had open source projects that handled it, the same thing will happen here.

[-] sanpo@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 days ago

Bullshit on what?

Requiring people to reverse engineer their own driver to avoid vendor lock-in is an objectively shitty move from Valve.

And the last time I tried them these 3rd party drivers didn't work all that well, just because it technically works it's a little useless if it's not exposing all the functions to customize the controller.

[-] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

Ok, so you need to understand how devices interact with your system, in short they send sequential messages via the USB, your OS interprets those messages depending on what type of device it is. The piece of software that tells your system how to interpret the messages is what we call a driver. The original steam controller sent messages as if it was a mouse and keyboard, so you could plug it on anything that didn't even had Steam installed and it would work, but not as you would expect it to. The "driver" was nothing more than a thin layer that just did a remapping of "button 1 means controller A, button 2 means controller B, etc" which is the exact same thing SteamInput does.

And the new controller is the same, I can now say this for sure because Gamer Nexus mentioned in their video that the controller works as a mouse on a PC without Steam. So yeah, bullshit, the controller works as expected eleven without steam, you should be able to go into your game and change the mapping and press buttons, it will be weird as the game will show you keyboard icons instead of controller, but the steam controller is not a normal controller so it can't send the same inputs as other controllers which is somewhat limited.

In short the steam controller works even without steam, but without SteamInput to map what each button/gesture means it's picked as a generic keyboard/mouse which is a deliverate decision to allow it to be used to control windows machines and reopen steam even if it closes. If it was mapped as a controller it wouldn't be able to move the mouse natively because Windows doesn't move the mouse with a controller by default.

this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
437 points (98.2% liked)

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