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"Valve’s new Steam Controller has a major problem for PC games not on Steam"
(tech.sportskeeda.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
228 points (89.3% liked)
Steam Hardware
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Its a problem that it works that way not that it wasent advertised. Sure it works with steam but im betting people expected it to work like a basic controller outside of steam as well like xinput. Even the Xbox controller does this. Yes theres an app you can get to use the extra functions but my elite controller works like a normal controller without that app especially because I mainly use linux now.
There are a lot of people who link controllers to their phone either to game on their phone or stream games to their phone and I do not think the controller would work in that case.
Edit for some clarification: Steam is required for the controller to work and it only works for games added to Steam according to the article this means that:
This only accounts for a small amount of users sure but why should they be getting shafted when they dont have to be?
Where is really bad though is unless the driver is initialized on the log in screen what happens to your controller when you dont have internet? What happens when servers go offline or Valve decides to block your VPN or whatnot? Itll be a brick. I do not want to give any more credit to them I promise you but my Xbox and DualShock controllers work just fine in this situation. (I still do want a Steam controller but I do not want to reward this sort of behavior)
It's a problem when people don't understand what they're spending their money on. Steam can make their device do whatever the fuck they want, and "consumers" are fully within their rights to not buy it...
And we are able to freely criticize them about it. If any other company did the same people would be irate.
Other companies do the exact same though, Nintendo controllers don't support non-Nintendo devices (although they've been reverse-engineered for Steam and Linux).
... but the Steam Controller works with any hardware that can run Steam.
... which is... any PC, thats less than roughly 15-20 years old.
So this is absolutely not the exact same thing as what Nintendo does.
Steam is hardware agnostic. Nintendo is not.
You could run a Steam Controller on a Nintendo Switch, provided you got rid of Nintendo's operating system, like so:
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/handheld-gaming/steam-shown-running-on-nintendo-switch-thanks-to-latest-proton-beta-fex-2604-translates-x86-to-arm-friendly-instructions-on-linux
I did forget about Nintendo but to be fair, people hate the shit out of Nintendo. Microsoft and Sony controllers have been pretty plug and play for me though.