$60, has capacitive joysticks, gyro, steam menu buttons, and 4 extra buttons. Fully supported in Steam Input.
However, no track pads or vibration.
You’re still better off with something from 8Bit-do at that price. If they included trackpads and vibration it would’ve been a nice Steam Controller v2.
This is cool and all, but no rumble is kind of a deal breaker for me
Same. I’ve got multiple 8bitdo products and I was still considering one, but no rumble is just weird.
Yeah, I was totally on board till I got to that part. What an absurd exclusion :/
Go figure. I usually turn rumble off.
yeah i don’t see why excluding rumble would be a deal breaker. is it an immersion thing?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I personally enjoy the feeling of the rumble.
Rumble is an information tool, it’s not just “haha, Brrr when shoot”. It’s incredibly useful in many ways, and also very much helps immersion. The rumble we have now is much more precise and varied than it was back in the n64 generation, especially with controllers like the ps5 dualsense. I have a Gulikit KK3 MAX and its rumble is amazing, with every feeling from small precise taps to arm-shaking explosions. And when a game has well designed rumble implementation, which many have now, it’s just awesome. One genre of games that really shine is racing games, you feel everything, even different vibrations on different parts of the controller if for example your left tires are on dirt and right ones are on asphalt.
A good example just from the top of my head was when I played Pacific Drive, your car can break in many ways and I always noticed that one of my tyres had a flat from the rumble before I noticed it any other way, and knew which side it was on just from the feeling.
I dont want rumble to immerse me, I dont want it at all actually
That’s great, you can simply turn it off.
We, however, cannot simply turn it on when it doesnt exist.
When can I use my Steamdeck as a controller? I will literally settle for that level of stupidness if we can’t have controller v2.
Aside: happy to see that it has some form of back paddles - but If Steam will allow them to be configured is another issue I’ve encountered.
Both the back paddles and gyro are things that are great, and every gamepad should have them, but there’s almost no compatibility with anything on PC.
Most I’ve ever seen is being able to change a button to a back paddle. Not even remapping a key, just a face or shoulder button. I swap it with the stick press buttons (L&R3). But it’d be great to be able to actually remap keys.
Steam itself has remapping functionality to extend any gamepad with customization. You can remap (and much more than just rempap) all keys and elements of a gamepad through the Steam Controller setup. People have uploaded their configurations, so you can download them. But this extended custom functionality is only for Steam.
I’ve never seen a steam profile with back paddles before. What game has it?
I know this thread is dead but no man’s sky has custom actions for the back paddles. I have my terrain manipulator size changer on the two back paddles
I think it depends on what control steam is detecting. Steam has gotten better recently with controller schemes, but you can’t add backpedals to an xbox controller layout still. For example. (At least from what ive seen)
I think it’s a game by game thing because my deck lets me bind the back paddles to actions (rather than button presses) like an in game binding menu would but others don’t have that
Your deck is not an xbox controller. It has back pedals built in.
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.
They probably pay lots of money for it
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.
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:
Ah ok. That’s slick.
I wish steam would recognize all the buttons on my gamepad like that.
