Valve’s 2026 Steam Controller has its first major review score, and PC Gamer has handed it an 83/100. Solid, but not flawless.
The verdict frames Valve’s new pad as a premium PC accessory built around dual trackpads, gyro aiming, back paddles, and deep Steam Input customization. Think Steam Deck controls ripped out of the handheld and dropped onto your coffee table.
At $99, it’s pitched squarely against Microsoft’s Xbox controllers, Sony’s DualSense, and the growing wave of third-party Hall effect pads from 8BitDo, GameSir, and Flydigi. Valve isn’t trying to win on raw specs, though. It’s selling the Steam ecosystem.
PC Gamer praised the trackpads, the gyro, the back buttons, and the absurd level of remapping Steam Input enables. Radial menus, action layers, mouse emulation, per-game profiles, the whole Valve playbook. For mouse-heavy PC genres like MMOs, strategy, city builders, and sims, this is the controller’s killer pitch.
The inline symmetrical sticks and twin trackpads mirror the Steam Deck layout, which is the whole point. Docked Deck owners and couch-PC players are the obvious target audience.
The downsides are pretty specific. The controller polls at 250Hz, meaning a 4ms input interval. That’s fine for casual play, twice as fast as a standard Xbox pad and on par with the DualSense, but it lags behind newer premium controllers offering 1,000Hz.
The face buttons are membrane rather than mechanical, which will divide buyers. And there’s no headphone jack, with The Verge reporting the controller doesn’t carry audio over USB either. For living room setups, that’s a real miss.
The biggest catch: the controller leans heavily on Steam to function. Trackpads, gyro, and advanced remapping all run through Steam Input. Outside Steam, it reportedly falls back to a basic desktop mode similar to the original Steam Controller’s “Lizard mode,” emulating mouse and keyboard inputs. Non-Steam games can be added to your Steam library as a workaround.
