Valve Steam Controller Update Will Rock Your World, or at Least Rumble it a Little

Valve has now sold over half a million Steam Controllers. That’s a lot of people using the controller for their desktops, Steam Boxes and Steam Link machines. With so many units, Valve have a large pool of users to seek feedback from, and seek it that have, with some improvements made recently to enhance the experience among users of the peripheral. They took to their official community to announce the changes.

The controller can now be configured and used from the desktop in full, including the pop-up keyboard to communicate with non-Steam programs. Thinking of non-Steam programs, once you’ve added them into Steam, you can share layouts with other users just like with Steam games, making it a lot easier to get key configuration for those games not available through the digital distribution platform.

You can streamline the setup process by saving templates to be used across games without having to setup from scratch for each times. You can also create “Action Sets” to switch between on the fly. This means you can have different control layouts within the same game. With a game like Grand Theft Auto for example, you could have one layout for walking, one for sailing and one for driving.

The Steam Controller can also now use its Force Reactors to capture and reproduce the rumble effects from your favourite games. There’s also more Steam VR Support by way of Steam Controller support in VR Game Theater mode, including using the motion controls as a steering wheel.