When the new Steam Controller goes on sale on May 4th, it will go up against much more established gamepads in the Xbox Wireless Controller and PS5 DualSense vein – though none that share its singular focus on being a PC gaming controller, specifically. Why are there so few PC pads?
It’s a question I put to Valve designer Lawrence Yang and engineer Steve Cardinali, who’ve also worked on the Steam Deck, Steam Deck OLED, and the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame VR hardware. And while theories were offered, the true reasoning for the peripheral industry’s console monogamy was, alas, left a mystery.
“I actually don’t know why!” Yang chuckles. “But we definitely did see an opportunity for a Steam-first, PC-first controller, and that’s why we made it.”
“I think it’s partially hard,” Cardinali offers, “because if you’re trying to make a controller for PC, you have to choose certain buckets that you want to live in-between, which instantly has you pitted against other controllers that are out there. And so you have to be really cognisant of, like, ‘Hey, what additional problems are we trying to solve here when we make this controller, and has it already been solved? And is it worth the effort to put into it with this controller?’
“We believe in the feature set we’re providing, providing gamers with a way to play games in all new ways, and so we see value in it. But it’s hard to find that balance, and make it worth the effort you put into it.”
Yang adds that while a majority of controller-owning Steam users are already being served by Xbox gamepads, Valve still think it worthwhile to build something tailor-made for the app’s home platform – particularly considering the inherent compromise of playing with console kit on a desktop.
“I think another way to look at it is: a lot of the controllers that are on the market right now are made by console makers, and they’re making it for their own consoles, not necessarily for PC,” Yang notes. “We’ve done a lot of work on Steam so that every controller that we can find will work on Steam. And I think last we checked… in 2024 we did a blog post about Steam Input, and I think we saw something around 59% of people on Steam were using Xbox controllers. 26% were using PlayStation controllers, and about 10% of people on Steam were actually on Steam Decks, for all controller sessions. And that split is kind of telling. It’s like the vast majority of those are already covered, in a lot of ways, for people who are like, ‘Well, I already have one of these controllers laying around, and it’s good enough’.
“But we feel there’s definitely an opportunity to make something that’s better than ‘good enough’ for PC gaming.”
Not to parrot my own review, but I do think the renewed Steam Controller broadly achieves this goal. On top of having all the thumbsticks and mainstream inputs that longtime Xbox controller wielders would want – a big shift from the original Steam Controller’s eccentricity – its Deck-style trackpads and ability to control everyday Windows applications make it drastically more useful, and comfortable, than console models for PC use. It does rely on Steam Input, so in this instance “PC gaming” specifically means “PC gaming through Steam”, but then if you’re dropping £85 on this thing already, you’re probably not fussed about divesting yourself from Valve’s platform dominance.
Elsewhere in our chat, Yang and Cardinali also spoke of frustrations around ongoing Steam Machine delays, and which Steam Controller features they’d like to bung in a potential next-gen Steam Deck. Several, it turns out.
