I was extremely excited to try out the Steam Controller. I've been a fan of Valve and Steam for a very, very long time. It was a hugely fantastic letdown on every single front.
I was hoping that purchasing a Steam Controller would let me play some of the games that were clearly controller-based like Rocket League, or other action-type games not particularly well-suited for keyboard and mouse.
The controller feels plasticky, poorly balanced, and fragile. Give it a gentle shake and you can actually hear the buttons moving around.
Every single game I wanted to play required configuration of some sort or simply didn't work. I even bought games like Rocket League specifically to make use of the controller.
Instead of just working. I had to unplug the USB dongle a couple of times, setup some manual configuration, only to have it still not work, have to be blown all away and reset back to default. It eventually worked... until the next time I went to play and sure as hell: I had to restart Steam a couple times, re-plug in the USB dongle a few times, and eventually the controller was properly identified and working.
The sheer number of incorrect options available for this thing make it useless. Should it emulate keyboard? Is it a gamepad? Joystick? Mouse and gamepad? Mouse and joystick?
I lamented my purchase and wished I would've bought a more standard controller like an Xbox controller or a PlayStation controller as this was a nightmare.
The article appears to be heading down the right track, with trying to get developers on board with mapping actions instead of buttons, but I simply don't have the time to tinker with something like a controller. When I want to play a video game, I want to sit and play a video game.
I spoked to some of my game development friends about it and every one of them said that controller and device support was among one of the most mind-numbingly frustrating and difficult parts of cross-platform development.
The last time I tried the Steam Controller, I fired it up and none of it worked. I could see the controller was detected, but nothing worked. The mouse pad, buttons, controls, nothing. This had happened so many times before. I installed the beta version of Steam, browsed forums for fixes, and everything.
I tried very hard to like this peripheral but it was a complete failure. I'm very hesitant to try even more configuration options considering how much time I sunk into it last time. I literally gave up on having a controller-based gaming experience with my computer, got a PS4 for the holidays, and haven't looked back.
I still play games on my computer, but I gave up on the dream of having a nice controller-based gaming experience on my computer.
I've had no such troubles. I play Rocket League with my steam controller regularly. Sounds like you might have gotten a bad one, did you contact support?
As I mentioned, once things were configured in a game, it worked mostly. But for no good reason, would fail sometimes either at detection, or if I turned the controller on before opening Steam in big picture mode, it would also often cause conflicts with it not knowing if it was a mouse, or a game pad, or a controller, or what it was supposed to be.
There were enough forum posts around with folks having similar issues, that I guess I just assumed you had to be willing to spend time tinkering a lot if you wanted it to work, and thought contacting support would end up being an even larger time sink.
Those are just a couple of examples. Attempting other games would end up with incorrect mappings, incorrect button listings, not working, and more.
No, I had given up on controller-based gaming when I invested the time and money into attempting the experience and had such a rough go at it. I've gone through decades of using different types of controllers on the computer to different tunes of success.
I don't have a tremendous amount of time for games at the moment. Certainly not enough that I want to be tinkering with, or resetting things, when I'm ready to play.
I received a PS4 for the holidays and it's consistently delivered the experience I was hoping to find so I haven't revisited attempting a controller on the computer.
I was hoping that purchasing a Steam Controller would let me play some of the games that were clearly controller-based like Rocket League, or other action-type games not particularly well-suited for keyboard and mouse.
The controller feels plasticky, poorly balanced, and fragile. Give it a gentle shake and you can actually hear the buttons moving around.
Every single game I wanted to play required configuration of some sort or simply didn't work. I even bought games like Rocket League specifically to make use of the controller.
Instead of just working. I had to unplug the USB dongle a couple of times, setup some manual configuration, only to have it still not work, have to be blown all away and reset back to default. It eventually worked... until the next time I went to play and sure as hell: I had to restart Steam a couple times, re-plug in the USB dongle a few times, and eventually the controller was properly identified and working.
The sheer number of incorrect options available for this thing make it useless. Should it emulate keyboard? Is it a gamepad? Joystick? Mouse and gamepad? Mouse and joystick?
I lamented my purchase and wished I would've bought a more standard controller like an Xbox controller or a PlayStation controller as this was a nightmare.
The article appears to be heading down the right track, with trying to get developers on board with mapping actions instead of buttons, but I simply don't have the time to tinker with something like a controller. When I want to play a video game, I want to sit and play a video game.
I spoked to some of my game development friends about it and every one of them said that controller and device support was among one of the most mind-numbingly frustrating and difficult parts of cross-platform development.
The last time I tried the Steam Controller, I fired it up and none of it worked. I could see the controller was detected, but nothing worked. The mouse pad, buttons, controls, nothing. This had happened so many times before. I installed the beta version of Steam, browsed forums for fixes, and everything.
I tried very hard to like this peripheral but it was a complete failure. I'm very hesitant to try even more configuration options considering how much time I sunk into it last time. I literally gave up on having a controller-based gaming experience with my computer, got a PS4 for the holidays, and haven't looked back.
I still play games on my computer, but I gave up on the dream of having a nice controller-based gaming experience on my computer.