Steam Controller Review: Valve's New Gamepad Redefines PC Gaming

I grew up using a mouse and keyboard. I played a lot of competitive shooters and I just didn't play console games very much. In fact, I avoided using controllers unless I was playing very specific titles. And in the 10 plus years I've been doing YouTube, I've never found an a controller that was interesting enough to do a dedicated video like this. Not even the original Steam Controller. But there's a new one, and this one is very different. So, this is the new Steam Controller from Valve. And let me start off with why I don't like using controllers when I play PC games. I prefer using mice simply because I find them to be more accurate. So mice are positionbased input systems in the sense that if you have a mouse

and you have it on like a mouse pad or something. If you move your mouse one inch to the right, that'll move your cursor or crosshair a specific number of pixels. And the moment you stop moving the mouse, the cursor also stops moving. And this is very easy for the human brain to just remember that movement and have the muscle memory of just how much do you need to move to hit certain targets. And that's why mouse players can do flick shots very consistently. But sticks on a controller are quite different. Instead of a positionbased input, joysticks are a ratebased input. So they translate the angle that you move the stick into a velocity value. And that is that tells your character or the cursor to start moving

at a particular speed. And if you stop moving, it just maintains that speed. You have to let go of this thing and to reset it to the neutral position and that's when you stop. It does work well and there are many competitive gamers that use controllers, but I've just never found them to be accurate enough to prefer it over a mouse and keyboard. And it makes sense to me as to why aim assist is available for players who use controllers. Now, there are a couple ways that you can introduce positionbased inputs onto controllers. So, the first is gyroscopes. As you move controllers around with a gyroscope inside, it measures the tilt and the acceleration and velocity and all of that translates into a fairly precise

positionbased input. And then the other way is through touchpads. And Sony was also one of the first companies to integrate touchpads. But the way that Sony implements it is that it serves as like a secondary function. The movement and the aiming is not done through that touch sensitive area. You'd still do it through the sticks. And then this touch sensitive section is for like tapping and just like secondary functions. Now the first company to do a touch sensitive area that was used for primary controls like walking and aiming, shooting was the original Steam Controller. So this had two touch sensitive areas, but it lacked a D-pad or at least a real one. This is kind of like this quasi D-pad they had. And

there was only one analog stick. And I bought this for 50 bucks when it first came out. I was pretty excited to try it. And I just found it lackluster. The big thing is it just was lacking traditional controls. And I think a lot of gamers who picked this up at launch felt the exact same way. It was like a neat idea. It was kind of innovative, but it just wasn't the way that we wanted to play games. And it mostly because this lacked regular controls and also at the time you needed a lot of work to get this thing to work with most Steam games. It just would needed a lot of tweaking and customization to be able to pull it off. But now there's a new Steam controller that fixes most of the

issues that people had with the original. And it's combined traditional controls. So, you got two sticks, you got a D-pad, it combines a gyro and really great touch sensitive pads that just this is so good that it's changed my perspective of what gaming on a controller can be like. Okay, first let's talk about the ergonomics. So, it's like a 292 g device. It's not super heavy or anything, but because this is relatively large, the first day that I used it, because like the grip was a little bit wider than I was used to, my hands did feel a little bit tired. After the second day, I never thought about the weight or size ever again. But that first day, I remember it was a little bit of a big boy. The layout of this

controller is nice. I like the positioning of all of it. The D-pad, the buttons, the sticks. My hands when I grip it just naturally go to these things. And I also really like the positioning of the touchpads. These sit right below the sticks and they are what I think is the perfect spot for touchpads. And then the back buttons. These feel and sound just really nice. They actuate with just the right amount of pressure to me. I think they're really nicely placed. Now, the one thing I would knock about the kind of the design of it is just it's a very thick and chunky design. If you look at the PlayStation 5 controller, this is very elegant looking thing. Most controllers are just leaner than this big boy. But yeah, it is a great controller. Now, the

TMR sticks, uh, it stands for tunneling magnetoresistance sticks. And these are supposed to be better than Hall effect tech in basically every way. They have a tighter dead zone. They're more durable and what I think is the most important thing is that they use less energy. So, the battery life is noticeably longer with this technology. I really like how these sticks feel in game and same with the D-pad. This feels very much like the one on the Steam Deck and it's just a great quality and positioned D-pad. The gyro worked really well on this new controller and the new Doom played particularly well with it. There's a capacitive strip on the bottom, like there's one here, and there's one here,

so you can engage and disengage the jar without having to touch the sticks. Spec-wise though, this does not have a particularly high pulling rate. So, the some of the top players in the space have like a,000 hertz. The Steam controller only comes in at 250, but using it, it still feels very smooth and responsive to me. Now, the touchpads are what I think define this whole experience for me. Uh, so if you're unfamiliar with what these things even are, they are two very small like touchpad, trackpad type things like you would see on a laptop. But underneath each one of these things are little haptic motors, so you can feel there's like a little bit of a sensation if you want to kind of give you tactile

feedback of what you're doing. And these are the same size as the ones that are on the Steam Deck. They are slightly different orientation because of the tilt, like the left right tilt, but they're pretty much the same size. And these are very versatile input devices. You can assign these to movement. So as you move your finger around, it directly translates to movement in game. And when you stop moving on this thing, it stops. Uh, and you can also set the pads to be a radial menu in game to select weapons. Or you can split up the pad into four different quadrants so that maybe you want four quick swap weapons in each corner. It's very flexible and it's

actually really good for playing games that were built around the mouse and keyboard experience. Out of the box, you can use these touchpads to control your mouse cursor on your desktop. Like so if you're running Windows, as long as you have Steam running in the background, you can just use it as if it was a trackpad on a laptop and you can navigate around on your operating system. You can also type with them. And because each touchpad covers one half of the keyboard, it's actually faster than using sticks to select one letter at a time. But this combination of really good traditional controls with really good gyros and also with excellent like truly excellent touchpads, this is it's

chef's kiss. This is such a great gaming experience from this controller. You get the best wireless connection when you use the dongle. This is a 2.4 GHz connection. And in the box, you get a cable that is USBA to USBC. So, the USBC would connect to this dongle and the USBA side would connect to your computer. Now, if you have one of a new laptop that's USBC only, you're going to have to get your own cable. And this dongle is also how you magnetically uh charge your controller. So when you uh slide your uh controller up to it, the magnets stick in and it is a very convenient and wellthoughtout mechanism to charge a device while also being the wireless receiver. It's super low latency and it

feels as responsive to me as a wired connection. I played a few games that need pretty clean timing and it felt great. Now my kid loves Geometry Dash. He's never played it with a controller before, but the input timing on that game is very tight at times. And he tried it for the first time, and some of the stuff on this level needs near frame perfect inputs, and he had no problems on this controller. Now, supposedly off of one dongle, you can connect up to four of these controllers with no measurable impact on latency. And I was only sent two of these devices to test out. And from my measurement, there at

least with two, there is no impact. It is a surprisingly low latency connection. Uh, if you do run it on Bluetooth, like if you don't want to use this dongle and you say you want to connect it to, I don't know, any device that uses Bluetooth, it has a nominal amount of latency. So, the Steam Controller has the same amount of inputs as the Steam Deck. It's got the same number of buttons, the same number of touchpads, the same number of sticks. And because the Steam Deck was so popular, it sold like 8 million units or something like that, there are a lot of community profiles that have been made for this control layout. And also developers have spent a lot of time optimizing their games to take advantage

of this control layout. So because of those two things, this controller right out of the box has great support. Like you go into any game, there's already a profile that just works really well for this control scheme. And the thing about like the reason why it's so important is that with really good hardware, like even if this was amazing hardware, if you had to go into each game and set it up and like customize stuff and tweak it, it would be awful. People would find this experience just unusable. But they like I think Valve was so smart in doing this. They put this thing out and made sure there's enough users playing with this thing, building those profiles up so that the moment this thing came out,

it's like perfect right out of the box in terms of support by games. Now, on the old Steam controller, there was a two-stage trigger. You'd pull it back and then at the very end, you could click it in one more time to be able to just give you that secondary function with it. And I think a lot of Rocket League players would use it for like throttle and then boost. But this new Steam Controller does not have that functionality. And I think it's the simple reasoning behind it is that they wanted this controller to match the one to one mapping of being able to go to the Steam Deck profiles and just use it. So unfortunately the new Steam controller does not have that second stage trigger. Now getting in the

controller is pretty easy. There's seven torque screws in the back. And once you remove it, there's a few things I want to draw your attention to. The first is this uh capacitive sensor that's on the back of it. This is the thing that engages and disengages the gyro. It's visible there. And also you can see these metal buttons here. These are like the metal dome buttons. And these are where the back buttons are. And this is why you have that like tactile snap when you press it. Uh there's also this battery. It's not glued in. It's not screwed in. It actually pops out fairly easily. You just grip it on the corner here and it just comes right off. Uh and so if you ever want to like replace it

down the line, it's remarkably easy. Now, the rest of this is supposedly very repairable except for the actual TMR sticks. Those are supposedly like mounted right onto the board, soldered in. And I think it's because Valve has such high confidence that they will last very long that they were comfortable doing that. You can also see the huge motors down here. This is for the haptics. And you can also see the uh triggers and shoulder buttons up here. But it's a nice black PCB. Now, in terms of battery life, I got this thing in about two weeks ago, and I charged to full right out of the box. And for the first week, I didn't have to charge it at all. I was just playing a ton of

games on it. And I measured roughly about 30 hours of use before I had to juice it again. And it wasn't like completely empty. I was like, "H, it's low enough that I should." They're claiming 35 hours plus. I think that's going to depend a lot of like what games you're playing. I was playing a ton of Ninja Turtles, which is like spamming non-stop. So, I think that is does have an effect on how quickly the battery drains, but I do think 35 hours more is a very realistic uh number. Terms of pricing, this is going to be available on May 4th for $99 US. This is definitely more expensive than I thought it would be. I was hoping for it to be like 80 bucks, and it's just because

there's so many good controllers at that $50, $60 price range. Like the Bit Do ones are fantastic. I do think 100 bucks is like the cusp of where I think it can be. Now, this Steam controller is supposed to launch at some point with a Steam machine, a cube that can play games, and that thing can fit into here. This is a functional prototype from Dbrand of the Companion Cube out of Portal. This is so sick. Uh, if you know what this is, I'm sure you're probably looking at this thing and being like, it's pretty awesome. So, uh, it fits in there. I can't wait for the steam machine to come out so it works with this and I can put it in here and just live in portal glory. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video.