Skip to main content

Valve shows its competitive edge, shipping 500,000 Steam Controllers in seven months

valve sells 500000 steam controller steamcontroller2
Image used with permission by copyright holder
While it isn’t about to kill the dominance of Xbox and PlayStation gamepads being used on the PC, Valve’s Steam controller does seem to have bitten a big chunk out of that market, as it’s managed to sell over half a million of them in the last seven months.

Although the Steam Controller faced a few difficulties when first released, the regular updates and the fact that Valve has opened it up for anyone to mod and tweak it seems to have helped.

Recommended Videos

Since its release features like game profiles have expanded with uniform mappings for certain genres and others for specific games – though fans have also added their own ideas to that mix. You can also configure the controller from your desktop now, which makes things a little easier. And there’s support for games purchased outside of Steam now too.

Valve also recently announced full support in virtual reality for games that utilize traditional controller input.

All of that has helped Valve shift as many units of the controller as it has, but in typical fashion it isn’t done with the updates just yet. One of the big features coming down the pipeline, according to the respective blog entry, is Activators. These are actions that might seem simple to PC users, but are much rarer on a gamepad.

Double click, click and hold and toggle on/off, are all functions that will soon be available to Steam Controller users.

If all of this wasn’t enough to tempt you to buy one yourself, Valve is also offering the Steam controller at 30 percent off at the moment, along with the Steam Link. There are also a number of Civilisation VI bundles going too, so be sure to jump on this if you need a replacement for your ageing PC gamepad.

Have any of you picked up a Steam controller? How do you rate it compared to more traditional alternatives?

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
We just got our first hint of the RTX 6090, but it’s not what you think
A hand grabbing MSI's RTX 4090 Suprim X.

As we're all counting down the days to a possible announcement of Nvidia's RTX 50-series, GPU brands are already looking ahead to what comes next. A new trademark filing with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) reveals just how far ahead some manufacturers are thinking, because it mentions not just the Nvidia RTX 5090, but also an RTX 5090 Ti; there's even an RTX 6090 Ti. Still, it'll be a long while before we can count the RTX 60-series among the best graphics cards, so what is this all about?

The trademark registration filing, first spotted by harukaze5719 on X (formerly Twitter) and shared by VideoCardz, comes from a company called Sinotex International Industrial Ltd. This company is responsible for the GPU brand Ninja, which doesn't have much of a market presence in the U.S.

Read more
How the Blue Screen of Death became your PC’s grim reaper
The Blue Screen of Death seen on a laptop.

There's nothing more startling than your PC suddenly locking up and crashing to a Blue Screen of Death. Otherwise known as a Blue Screen, BSOD, or within the walls of Microsoft, a bug check screen, the Blue Screen of Death is as iconic as it is infamous. Blue Screen of Death is not a proper noun, but I'm going to treat it like one. It's what you were met with during crashes on Intel's 14th-gen CPUs, and it littered airport terminals during the recent CrowdStrike outage.

Everyone knows that a Blue Screen is bad news -- tack on "of Death" to that, and the point is only clearer. It's a sign that something catastrophic has happened, so much so that the operating system can't recover, and it needs to reboot your PC in order to save it. The Blue Screen of Death we know today, fit with its frowning emoticon, is a relatively new development in the history of Windows.

Read more
The performance downgrade made to the M4 Pro that no one is talking about
Someone using a MacBook Pro M4.

I've spent this whole week testing the new M4 chip, specifically the M4 Pro in both the Mac mini and 16-inch MacBook Pro. They are fantastic, impressive chips, but in my testing, I noticed something pretty surprising about the way they run that I haven't seen others talk much about. I'm talking about the pretty significant change Apple made in this generation to power modes.

First off, Apple has extended the different power modes to the "Pro" level chips for the first time, having kept it as an exclusive for Max in the past. The three power modes, found in System Settings, are the following: Low Power, Automatic, and High Power. The interesting thing, however, is that in my testing, the Low Power drops performance far more this time around.

Read more