Brief first impressions with the Steam Controller

^{DATE : 16.05.2026}

In this brief post, I shall offer my first impressions of the Steam Controller.

Do note that this post is by its nature highly subjective and solely focuses on my own experience. If you want a comprehensive review, there are many, many resources for it.

Steam Controller..?

Yep! Valve designed and brought on sale (technically a second – there was one also in back in 2015) a controller, specifically designed to work well with Steam, and a large variety of games.

I bought it on launch day, directly from Valve. I was fairly lucky, as apparently the release triggered a nasty bout of scalping, and many of those who wanted a controller were left without.

It is a big, chunky controller. Kind of has to be though – how else you’d fit touchpads anywhere? In addition to all standard XBOX-style buttons and extra buttons around the back, plus sophisticated electronics this contains.

Touchpads

Like the Steam Deck, it has two touchpads, which, in my opinion, are one of its top features. The controller and its software are designed as such that they can be used alike to a computer mouse both in games, and on your desktop when not using Steam.

Couch gaming is suddenly quite a bit more practical – no need for a separate mouse, the controller will do it for you. And I think the controller does it very well. Of course, you will need a keyboard – but that isn’t a major issue, as there are innumerable wireless keyboard options on the market. See the example below for the one I use.

As far as I’m aware, at the time of writing this post, there is no other controller offering equivalent features on the market

KDE+X11 interlude

I personally run a Fedora Kinoite instance on my gaming station. Like others before me, apparently, I ran into an issue where KDE would explicitly request permission from me to allow Steam to manage input devices. And despite my attempts, I wasn’t able to find a way to allow Steam (and Steam only) to do so without prompting. If I did not react to the prompt, the controller would not work correctly in whatever scenario that required adjusting the settings.

As proposed in the comment linked, I got it to work by enabling (legacy X11) apps to control mouse and keyboard without prompting. However, I will emphasize that whilst this works, it is by no means ideal from a security standpoint – it substantially weakens isolation guarantees that Wayland would otherwise enforce. I allowed this on a device explicitly dedicated for gaming purposes where this tradeoff is acceptable.

General quality

As for the controller in general, it feels like a solid, quality product. Nothing feels “cheap” or shoddily made, and the controller is pleasant to use. All features work as expected, and no dealbreaker issues have cropped up so far.

Steam integration

As you would expect from Valve, the Steam Controller has solid integration to Steam itself. From Steam, you can adjust just about any aspect of the controller’s behavior, both globally and per-game. It really is very customizable. I myself have found default profiles mostly sufficient so far, but I’m glad that there are solid options available should I later find a need to diverge from defaults.

The catch? You need Steam. As far as I know, Steam does the background magic related to mapping the controller to games you play. You need to have Steam in the loop in some way, even if it is a game from outside Steam (which Steam has support for).

A casual search suggests there is work in progress to change this state of affairs… but it will almost certainly take its time to evolve into a stable, well-supported set of alternative tooling.

Conclusion

If you play with Steam, and have spare cash for it, go for it. If you want something more universally compatible… consider something else.

P.S. If you get one, please try not to drop it. It gets frightened and it isn’t healthy for a controller.