Fantastic build quality. Incredibly accurate TMR thumbsticks. Highly customizable inputs. Included puck is a marvel for charging and connectivity.

Can’t use with PC games outside of Steam. Gyroscope tricky to properly calibrate. Thumbsticks sit slightly too high. Can’t really shine until Steam Machine hardware arrives.

A decade on from the original Steam Controller, Valve is back with a modern update, ditching the unwieldy dimensions, splayed grips, and odd trackpads, instead adopting a much more conventional design approach—and some slightly different trackpads.

This second-generation Steam Controller arrives at an odd time, though. The new joypad is part of Valve's renewed push into the hardware space, meant to be used alongside the console-like Steam Machine gaming PC—itself another revamped foray into the field—and the Steam Frame, the company’s new VR headset. Except both of those are delayed, largely because the AI bubble is sucking up RAM, GPUs, and CPUs with the gravitational pull of a black hole. At the time of writing, neither of Valve’s other projects has a release date or confirmed price.

However, gamepads don’t typically need RAM, GPUs, or CPUs, making the new Steam Controller pretty much the only piece of hardware Valve can release for the time being, and for a relatively reasonable price. The Steam Controller arrives divorced from its intended context, making some of its more impressive aspects hard to appreciate.

All Decked Out

The new Steam Controller is pretty impressive. It boasts a ridiculous number of inputs and features, is almost overwhelmingly customizable to ensure compatibility with just about any game on Steam, and, barring one small caveat, is rather comfortable to use.

In terms of inputs, it takes almost every control method from the Steam Deck, short of the touchscreen, and crams it into an 11 x 16 x 6 cm design. Valve tries to have it both ways when it comes to the more familiar controls, using Xbox’s ABXY face buttons and broad design aesthetic but PlayStation’s symmetrical thumbstick layout, plus the twin shoulder buttons and pair of analog triggers. Players accustomed to either will soon adapt to this hybrid approach.

The Steam Controller goes beyond either of its console cousins, though, with a whole fleet of inputs that neither Sony nor Microsoft has on their default pads. A quadrant of extra buttons sits on the underside of the grip, and the thumbsticks are clickable, feature capacitive touch sensors, and are built on tunnel magnetoresistance sensors (TMR), which offer even greater precision and durability than Hall effect systems.

There is also an accelerometer and a gyroscope for motion controls, and advanced rumble engines for nuanced haptics—it can pull off the same audio tricks that the Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con 2s do, vibrating at such high frequencies that the pad itself becomes an ersatz speaker, allowing for fun Easter eggs like a hidden Wilhelm Scream. Most striking are the same trackpads from the Steam Deck on the bottom half of the controller, allowing for mouse-like controls.

Despite cramming all this in, it weighs a mere 292 grams. It rarely feels burdensome, even after longer play sessions. However, I did have to adjust my grip slightly to comfortably reach the thumbsticks, as so much real estate is given over to accommodating the trackpads, which live where my thumbs naturally want to sit. The D-pad isn’t anything to write home about either—entirely adequate, but lacking clean edges and suffering from a glossy finish that robs it of grip. Aside from that cheap-feeling D-pad, the Steam Controller’s build quality is exceptional.

Maybe I’m easily pleased, but I’m disproportionately impressed by the adorable "puck" that the controller connects to your computer with. Attaching via the included USB-C to USB-A cable, it serves as both a wireless dongle and a micro charging dock, magnetically clipping onto the rear of the Steam Controller. Installation and setup were easy. Just press the Steam button in the center of the pad, and it communicates wirelessly through the puck with no discernible latency and no extra software or drivers required.

Once connected and turned on, a second press of the Steam button shifts everything to Big Picture mode, Steam’s console-like interface that allows for clearer navigation of your game library. The Steam client will already need to be open on your system for this—pressing the icon button won’t act as a launcher, though I suspect it might send a wake signal to the Steam Machine whenever it arrives. There doesn't appear to be any major changes to Big Picture mode to coincide with the Steam Controller’s launch—it’s still filled with chunky, bold tiles for each game in your library, clear filtering, and large text, all ready to be seen from the other side of the room when you’re playing on a TV.

Given that it features nearly all the inputs and gizmos of the Steam Deck, the first game I tried the Steam Controller on was Aperture Desk Job, Valve’s Portal spin-off that served as a glorified tech demo for the handheld. For the most part, the new pad was up to the task, mimicking the handheld console’s features pretty well. The only hiccup seemed to be one moment that involves the touchscreen on Steam Deck, but a mouse when using a controller—I’d have expected to be able to use the trackpads as the mouse cursor here, but couldn’t.

The gyroscope feature also tripped up a little, seemingly deactivated in the controller settings by default, and never quite felt correctly calibrated even after I’d turned it on. Valve says this feature should be activated with “Grip Sense,” a ridge on the underside of the grip that enables gyro with capacitive touch. However, this never seemed to work for me on any game I tried it with (I’m not entirely clear how it’s supposed to work, since the zone you’re meant to hold to turn the gyro on or off is where I’m always holding the pad anyway). I was able to map it to always on, always off, or toggled with a button press in the controller settings.

Customs Clearance

One of the Steam Controller’s neatest features is its insane customization through the Steam client. Whenever you launch a game from Big Picture mode, the Steam interface flashes up which of the pad’s inputs the game will use by default—highlighting, for instance, the thumbsticks, face buttons, and shoulder triggers on action games like Hades II or Crimson Desert—but if you don’t like a particular control arrangement, you can remap absolutely everything.

Tap the Steam button for quick access to common features, such as whether to activate the rear grip buttons, what the gyroscope does, or the behavior assigned to each trackpad. That’s especially useful for games where you might want to use a trackpad as a mouse for finer controls, such as for strategy titles. You can instantly adjust precision, dropping it as low as 25 percent responsiveness or as high as 3,000 percent. At any level, the trackpads offer their own haptic feedback, giving a satisfying tingle as you roll your thumb across them, which helps create a sensory link between where you touch the pad and what happens onscreen.

For more nuanced control tweaks, you can go deeper and edit the entire layout, meticulously changing what every single button on the pad does, fiddle with those aforementioned gyroscope settings, or even deactivate individual inputs entirely. It’s a huge win for players who like to tailor how they play or make certain commands easier. Accessibility probably wasn’t Valve’s primary concern here, but the ability to precisely adjust controls will help some players on that front.

Steam Pressure

Unfortunately, there’s one big exception to the Steam Controller's versatility. Notice above that I said it's customizable for use with just about any Steam game, not any PC game.

Most PC game controllers, whether high-end pads like Thrustmaster’s ESWAP X2 H.E or more accessible offerings like Hyperkin’s Competitor, connect to Windows with the XInput API, which broadly allows any game to recognize the device. The new Steam Controller exists largely within Valve’s walled garden, using the bespoke Steam Input. That means your computer won’t necessarily clock it as a controller, and it makes playing games you may have installed from other sources—rival storefronts like GOG or Epic Games, or indies bought directly from developers—almost impossible.

I tried out a couple of games through Epic, and in every instance I ended up in a halfway house at best. Some inputs would be recognized while others would end up in the wrong place or not appear at all (“jump,” in classic Metroidvania Guacamelee, mapped to what should be the “talk” button, for instance). Often, pressing the Steam Controller’s X button would bring up an onscreen keyboard, even for games that didn’t have text input. And given that all of those vaunted customization options are handled exclusively through the Steam client, I couldn’t find any way to remap controls in-game to work with the Steam Controller.

For me, that raises questions about who the Steam Controller is really for, at least right now. It’s so clearly tailored for TV play through Steam Machine that it’s hard to see other niches for it. Most PC players will have a mouse and keyboard to hand as they sit next to their gaming rigs, rendering the trackpad controls largely redundant, and a PC pad that only works with Steam’s library is inherently limiting, even if Valve is the largest game distributor on PC.

The closest you can get to the intended purpose is to pair the Steam Controller with a Steam Deck docked to your TV, but that feels a bit jerry-rigged, like an unfinished preview, only reinforcing how much it’s held back by the Steam Machine being MIA. The Steam Controller might shine when players can experience it as it’s meant to be, but until that target hardware arrives, it’s hard to justify it as a stand-alone PC gaming controller.