Valve Steam Controller

Valve Steam Controller came out in November 2015, and is a best seller on amazon. It is discontinued in November 2019.

Interesting feature is that it has 2 touchpads, plus a joystick. It screws traditional design of 2 joysticks and 1 directional-pad.

Here is a list of the main features.

• 2 touch-pads, each also can be pressed down, as a button.
• Wireless or wired. Just plug in the micro-usb cable to use it as wired.
• In the front, each side has 2 buttons: bumper button and trigger button. The trigger button has 2 stages. You can press it, or press it all the way down to get a click.
• At the bottom, where your ring finger and pinky holds the device, each side is also a button.
• A builtin gyroscope. It measures how you orient the thing.
• A builtin accelerometer. It measures how fast you have the thing.

This thing is designed to be compatible for PC, for any {Windows, Mac, Linux}.

Touchpad Features

The touchpads can be set to different things:

• directional pad
• button pad
• joystick move
• joystick camera
• mouse
• scrollwheel

Wireless Features

• Up to 80 hours game play when used as wireless.
• Wireless range is about 5 meters.
• Just plug in the USB cable and use it as wired.

Good Replacement of Mouse on a Personal Computer?

The short answer is, no.

What happens if you plug it in on a personal computer and use it as a mouse? Is it plug and play? What are the default actions of the touchpads and joystick and buttons, without installing a driver?

Here's one of the user Frenzie (on 2020-02-24) says:

The Steam controller works out of the box as a mouse, but then it's somewhat crappy. It needs Steam running to be decent.

Without Steam running, the right touchpad is the mouse and the left touchpad is nothing. The triggers click, but only if you press them fully.

With Steam running the right touchpad is a much better mouse/trackball and the left touchpad is for circular scrolling (out of the box; of course you can customize, but again, only with Steam running).

Good for Gaming?

For gamers, you probably won't like it. Either go with a keyboard + mouse, or, traditional controller. Many gamer's reviews simply said you couldn't aim well with the trackpad.

Here is a video of a funny gamer, reviewing the thing, and showing how it works in different kind of games.

History

• Valve Steam Trackball