The topic The Steam Controller is the new crown jewel of my couch gaming setup, and it’s… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
My couch gaming setup is a Bazzite ATX PC wired to the living room TV, and for years it’s had one nagging weak point: the controller. Not any single controller, but the whole category. Everything I tried got part of it right, but had a glaring downside. The Xbox controller I own worked out of the box with every game, but didn’t have any controls resembling a mouse, and connecting via my old sketchy Bluetooth receiver meant connection would drop very easily. A DualSense had the gyro, but connecting them always felt like a compromise, especially on Linux.
The 2026 Steam Controller is the first one that checks virtually all the boxes for me, and it instantly became the best part of gaming from the couch. It isn’t flawless in every measure, but for my comfy Bazzite setup, it fits like a glove.
Plenty of controllers do one or two things well. The Steam Controller is the only mainstream pad I know of that bundles dual haptic trackpads, a six-axis gyro, touch-activated gyro through Valve’s Grip Sense, four remappable rear buttons, and HD haptics into a single device. Each of these features is something that’s nice to have on its own, but when all of them are found on one controller, along with everything else that’s integrated, it’s difficult to find a fault.
The trackpads stand in for a mouse in games that were clearly built around one, but there’s an added bonus here: in moments where I need to navigate a menu with a mouse, such as on the desktop of a host PC in Moonlight, the trackpads are so much better than fumbling around with an analog stick, or GabeN-forbid, grabbing the mouse and keyboard from the center console.
The gyro is fine, though I’m not big on motion controls. The Grip Sense at least means it only kicks in when I’m actually holding the controller a certain way, rather than drifting on whenever I set it down. The four rear buttons let me keep my thumbs on the sticks or pads during anything that needs a jump or a reload mid-movement.
The obvious comparison is the Xbox Elite Series 2, which is the controller people reach for when they want premium inputs. It has paddles and adjustable-tension sticks, and it’s great, but it has no trackpads and no gyro, and in Canada the full version costs roughly double what the Steam Controller does. Valve hasn’t just matched the premium tier here. It’s shipping inputs the premium tier doesn’t offer, for less money.
The Steam Deck’s sequel won’t revolutionize the industry in the same way the original did.
Besides actually sitting down to use the thing, the other parts of the experience hold up very well. It pairs through its bundled Puck, a small 2.4GHz receiver that also acts as a magnetic charging dock. This completely solves my Bluetooth headache, and I haven’t once had any sort of connection issues.
I’ve configured my Bazzite system to wake upon turning on the controller, which is easier than it sounds. It won’t boot it from a cold start, but I don’t turn off this system at all anyway, only suspend. I anticipated having to be careful about how I set the controller on the Puck to charge if the system is asleep, as I figured that would wake it up, but simply configuring a new wake rule was enough. Granted, you can do this with any controller, not just the Steam one, but the Puck added a wrinkle that I wasn’t sure about.
There’s also the durability and repairability side of the equation, which Valve gets credit for. The sticks use tunneling magnetoresistance, a contactless magnetic sensing method that’s meant to resist the drift that eventually kills traditional potentiometer sticks. The controller is also genuinely easy to open, with accessible screws and no glued-in parts, and Valve has said it will sell spare parts through iFixit the way it does for the Steam Deck, which is great. To me, being able to replace the batteries, buttons, and shell should be the minimum on an expensive controller like this, and while replacing the sticks isn’t straightforward because they’re soldered to the main board, I’m happy that the rest of it is relatively repairable.
You can register your interest right now, but you’ll still need to wait.
The controller fits my hands very well, and I’d say I have average-sized hands, but my fiancée has a bit more trouble. She has to pronate her hands a bit to comfortably reach the thumbpads and sticks. That’s not a huge deal, but over a long session it’s definitely noticeable. Hand size and grip style genuinely decide whether this controller feels natural, and because it’s sold only through Steam with no retail shelf to try it on, anyone with smaller hands is buying somewhat blind.
The other, more serious downside to this thing is its reliance on Steam Input. On paper, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if you were to try to use this thing for something like an emulator or niche launcher, there’s a high likelihood it won’t pick up the input, requiring you to add said application to Steam as a non-Steam title. As of mid-2026, SDL2 merged native Steam Controller mapping, so the large set of games built on SDL now recognize it without Steam even running, which is definitely positive, but if you’re running plain Windows on your HTPC, you might be pulling out the mouse to add that non-Steam title more often than you might want.
As someone who’s running Bazzite squarely within Steam Gaming Mode, this isn’t something I run into often. For games that don’t run through Steam natively, I’m often reaching for Moonlight to stream it from my main host PC running Windows anyway, and launching that through Steam bypasses pretty much all of this.
As someone who continually fought with Bluetooth connections on Xbox controllers that didn’t fully fit my needs, the Steam Controller has instantly become my favorite piece of kit in the living room. From the moment I pulled it out of the box and plugged it in, it worked flawlessly with virtually everything I threw at it, and it was a natural fit alongside my Bazzite HTPC in Steam Gaming Mode. It’s a tad expensive, but you absolutely get what you pay for with this thing.