Anyone who appreciated the weirdness of the original Steam Controller – and it still has its fans, despite ceasing production in 2019 – might look at this new version and think “Oi, that’s just a Steam Deck with the screen cut out.” An accusation to which Valve, one suspects, might respond by slowly leaning forwards, eyes so wide they resemble the old version’s trackpads, staring the increasingly frightened sceptic in the face and whispering: “Yes.”
Except the new Steam Controller has more to it than merely transplanting the Deck inputs to a homebound gamepad. Having squeezed, caressed, and on a couple of occasions nearly dropped it on the floor of Valve HQ last month, I can tell it’s already boding well not just as a controller for mouse-minded PC games, but as a general purpose pad for everything else.
This was, admittedly, the point. I never got the impression, from the Valve engineers and designers I spoke to, that the company considers the old Steam Controller a washout, even as they revive the concept simultaneously with a new Steam Machine – previously one of PC hardware’s most tragic tales. The prevailing perception, one evidently shared with many owners, is that it did its job of making mouse-style controls more readily available to those who played away from their desks. If anything, its problem was that it was a tad too specialised, lacking home comforts like a second analogue stick or even conventional face button placements. Thus, it never challenged more conventional designs for the attention of platformer, twin-stick shooter, or fighting game players.
This new Steam Controller is, therefore, about being all things to all gamepaddists. The top half is somewhere between a Steam Deck and the PS5 Dualsense, with a semi-symmetrical dual stick layout and shoulder triggers that are no longer confined within plastic housing. Below, there are two trackpads, squared like the Deck’s but slightly bigger and angled for comfort. A quartet of rear buttons (yet another element borrowed from Valve’s handheld) rounds out the input count, but everything you really need to know about this controller is evident from one look at the front: it does regular gamepad stuff, and it does precision trackpad stuff. Boxes ticked, bases covered.
Most importantly, it works. I was never an OG Steam Controller convert but there’s something very natural – intuitive, even – about being able to immediately switch between double thumbsticks and the trackpads, depending on what’s being played. A bit of familiar, side-scrolling stick work in Hollow Knight: Silksong before thumbing the right pad to swiftly fire my science gun in Portal 2. Lovely. Neither system gets in the way of the other, and while the Steam Controller as a whole might have slabbish proportions, it’s an awful lot more comfortable than it looks. It’s light, too. As in, “this might drift out of my hands and lodge itself in one of Gabe Newell’s ceiling fans if I don’t grip it” light.
Rather than copy the Steam Deck controls wholesale, Valve’s engineers have made several technical improvements, especially over the base Deck. The trackpad haptics have the warmer, finer, less buzzy feel as the motors in the upgraded Steam Deck OLED, and the D-pad has been reworked to stay centred more reliably while delivering crisper diagonal presses; the latter is a subtle difference but, at least to my thumb, a tangible one. I even pulled my Deck OLED out of my bag to check.
Best of all are the thumbsticks, which have a similar, super-grippy feel to the Deck OLED’s, but have gained TMR (Tunneling Magnetoresistance) sensors. These work on similar principles to Hall Effect sticks and keys, using magnets rather than mechanisms to detect stick movements, and are in theory even more responsive, power-efficient, and less prone to stick drift malfunctions over time. In practice, I found they also enable an utterly tiny deadzone, allowing for Melinoë to make noticeably sharper turns in Hades 2.
This attention to detail also extends to the gyro controls, yet another method for camera-shunting that the new Steam Controller accounts for. On, for instance, the Steam Deck, gyro aiming is activated by either pressing a button or leaving a thumb on one of the capacitive inputs, namely the sticks or the trackpads. The Steam Controller goes further by adding capacitive sensors in the right grip, so you can wave it freely without needing to focus on thumb positioning – you’re activating gyro controls simply by virtue of holding it normally. This, too, feels pleasantly natural, and as someone who’s sold on the benefits of gyro aiming but has never developed the muscle memory for it, it’s a feature I’m especially keen to get more familiar with.
So much about the Steam Controller seems to have been, like these thumbstick and gyro tweaks, simply thought through. It unsurprisingly works with the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame, Valve’s new hybrid VR headset, but Bluetooth and USB connection options ensure wider compatibility. The rear buttons are raised, so they’re easier to press than those of the Steam Deck. The charging puck can snap onto the back of the Steam Controller magnetically, so you don’t even need to be paying particularly close attention when you go to connect them (and, on the subject of power, the approximate 35-hour uptime is nearly three times that of the PS5 pad).
However, as compellingly as it combines Gen 1 distinctiveness with straightforward crowd-pleasery, it’s important at this stage to determine what the new Steam Controller is not. It is not, for one, a truly high-end (or, in controller lingo, ‘Elite’) gamepad. Its triggers aren’t adjustable or adaptive, and neither the face buttons nor the improved D-pad have the satisfying, mouse button-esque clickiness of the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro I use at home. There’s also a dark side to the aforementioned lightness: it’s comfortable, but also feels somewhat insubstantial, with simple plastics instead of nicely rubberised grip textures.
At the same time, I couldn’t say it feels outright cheap. There’s just too much love being lavished on the inputs, which is, ultimately, what a gamepad is for. In fact, the little Steam Controller is by some margin – no disrespect meant to the new Steam Machine or Frame – the piece of upcoming Valve hardware that I most strongly anticipate wanting to buy for myself, which is a lot deeper down the hype hole than I ever managed with the last one.
As with the Machine and Frame, there’s no pricing or release date info on the Steam Controller yet, though they’re all broadly aiming for early 2026.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
