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Valve finally brought back the Steam Controller this year. The second-generation pad launched on May 4 at $99, with twin trackpads, magnetic TMR thumbsticks, four back grip buttons, and the little 2.4GHz puck that doubles as a charging dock. It sold out in under an hour, and by the afternoon, the $99 SKU was gone. People were experiencing transaction errors mid-purchase and eBay listings were already sitting at $230 to $250. Valve has since opened a reservation queue, but if you missed the first drop, you’re now waiting in line.
However, if you already own a Steam Deck, you’re holding the guts of a Steam Controller already. The Deck has two haptic trackpads, a gyro, and a full set of sticks and buttons, which is most of what made the Steam Controller worth wanting in the first place, and you can actually use it with your PC for gaming. There’s a catch in how you connect it, though: the Deck won’t enumerate as a HID gamepad when plugged into a computer, as it’s a PC in its own right with no USB gadget mode. Over Bluetooth it’s the same thing; a host that pairs with controllers rather than a device that pretends to be one.
People have been asking Valve for a native solution to use the Deck as a controller for years, and so far, every working method routes the Deck’s inputs over your network instead. You stream to the Deck, and the trackpads, gyro, and haptics come back to the PC as part of the same connection. As a result, it isn’t a true wired controller, and being honest, the Deck is a bit of an awkward slab to hold for hours. But hey, it works, and it’s free if you already have the hardware. For now, it’s filled the gap perfectly fine while I wait in the queue to pick up the new Steam Controller.
The path I settled on to get this working uses the standalone Steam Link app rather than the Remote Play streaming that’s built into the Steam client. You install it from Discover in Desktop Mode, where it shows up on Flathub like any other Flatpak. Both machines need to be on the same network and signed into the same Steam account, and Steam Link will find your PC on its own. The first connection asks you to confirm a PIN on the host to pair the two, and after that, it remembers the PC.
Once you connect, your PC’s desktop streams to the Deck and the Deck becomes the input device for whatever you launch. It basically treats the Deck like a Wii U GamePad, a screen-and-controller combo talking to a console sitting elsewhere in the house. You hold the Deck, the game runs on your PC, and the trackpads and sticks control it. Nothing actually installs or runs on the Deck beyond the Steam Link client, so it doesn’t matter whether the game is in your library locally or not.
For latency, you’ll want to drop into the streaming options and lower the resolution, since you’re not actually watching the Deck’s display. There’s no reason to stream a sharp 1280×800 image to a screen you’re not even looking at, and a lower resolution gives the connection more headroom for input. Steam Link also exposes a bandwidth limit and a toggle for hardware decoding, both of which are worth setting and forgetting.
Over Wi-Fi, it’s fine for most games, but you can take Wi-Fi out of the equation on both ends. Put the PC on Ethernet, which it probably already is, and run the Deck through a dock or a USB-C-to-Ethernet adapter, and you’ve got a wired path end to end. There’s still no direct USB controller cable doing the work and the inputs are still travelling over IP, but a wired local network drops the jitter and the latency to the point where most people stop noticing it entirely. For more sensitive games (looking at you, Celeste fans), it might be an issue, but it’ll be fine for most titles.
This is as close as the “wired” idea people go looking for actually gets. There’s no setting that turns the Deck into a wired gamepad, so the closest you’ll reach is a fully wired network between the two machines.
The reason I suggest using the Steam Link app over the built-in Remote Play comes down to how the Deck handles its own controls. If you launch Steam Link from inside Game Mode, the Deck’s own Steam layer is still running underneath, and it wants a say in how the trackpads and the Steam button behave. You end up fighting two layers of Steam Input for control of the same hardware.
The fix is to go to Desktop Mode, close Steam entirely, and then open the Steam Link app on its own. With the local Steam client out of the way, the Steam Input configuration coming from your PC takes full control of the Deck. The trackpads, the haptic feedback, the Steam button, and the back grips all answer to the host machine’s controller layout instead of the Deck’s local one.
That especially matters for the trackpads, which the Steam Controller’s whole identity is arguably built around. They offer greater controller and fantastic haptics, they’re something that no other Xbox-style gamepad can replicate. Letting the host’s Steam Input own them means a game configured for trackpad aiming or trackpad scrolling behaves the way it would with a real Steam Controller plugged in.
With that, it feels like a real controller for your games, and FPS titles which support it even get gyro aiming layered on top of the stick for fine adjustments, just like they would if they were running natively. The haptics under the pads give you the same textured feedback that you’re used to, and it just feels like a complete setup overall.
The only downside is that you’re operating out of Desktop Mode, which feels slightly wrong the first few times. You’re closing the software the Deck is built around in order to use the Deck. Once Steam Link is running and connected, though, you forget about it, and you get the cleanest version of the trackpad experience the Deck can offer.
There’s a second route if you want the Deck to show up to Windows as an actual Steam Controller rather than a streaming target. VirtualHere is a USB-over-IP tool that exposes the Deck’s internal Steam Controller HID across the network, and the PC running the VirtualHere client sees it as a native controller. To Windows, it’s just a Steam Controller that happens to be plugged in.
It’s more involved than I’d recommend for most people. You’re setting a user password on the Deck, dropping a Linux binary into a folder, adding it as a non-Steam game so Game Mode can launch it, and pointing the client at the Deck’s IP and port. It prompts for that password every session, and quitting cleanly can be quite finicky.
For non-Steam launchers, or for the cases where you want the OS itself to treat the Deck as a plugged-in gamepad, it’s the better fit. For everything else, Steam Link asks far less of you and gets you playing faster, which is why it’s the one I like to use the most.
None of this turns the Deck into the new Steam Controller, and it’s worth being aware of the limitations that a setup like this has. The Deck is heavier and wider than anything you’d choose to hold like a pad (unless you loved the Wii U, I guess?), the sticks aren’t drift-proof TMR units, and you can only use it with devices on the same network. The previous Steam Controller could pair to anything that will accept a Bluetooth controller, though with a bit of work. If you want the real thing, the reservation queue is the only honest answer.
With all of that said, the parts that make the Steam Controller unique, like the trackpads and the haptics, are sitting in the handheld device that a lot of us already own and can use for all kinds of things. Closing Steam and streaming over a wired network gives you those pads driven by your PC’s Steam Input, for the cost of an app you can install in two minutes.
I’d still rather have Valve’s shiny new Steam Controller on my desk, but until I can actually obtain one, the Deck is doing an alright job filling that gap.