PS5 controller support was introduced to Steam in beta earlier this month, albeit with no advanced features present – but the good news now is those nifty bits of functionality have been added, all except for one.
Valve’s Steam team announced that full support is now available for the DualSense controller including the rumble and gyro features, LED and trackpad – but there’s no mention of the adaptive triggers yet (hopefully that’s still in the pipeline).
This support is now in the Steam beta client, allowing players to enjoy games like Death Stranding or Horizon: Zero Dawn with the full range of PS5 DualSense controls. After further testing, there will be a wider rollout, so fingers crossed that this won’t take long (progress seems to have been quite rapid up to this point, that’s for sure).
Valve wrote: “Steam Input API offer gamers a significantly enhanced experience with a limited developer investment.”
That includes “seamless player experience with correct glyphs for all devices, including any remapping”, and that “updates just work … without any additional work required of the developer, when new features and/or devices are added to the API, they will ‘just work’ with these titles.”
Controller boom
Interestingly, Valve also observed that there has been a big increase in the number of Steam gamers using a gamepad. Apparently, over the past two years, the average number of daily users playing with a controller has more than doubled – and in controller-friendly games, 60% or more of players are found to be using a gamepad.
That makes sense, and with controllers getting more sophisticated in their design, adding features like the DualSense, numbers are only likely to increase – at least outside of the sort of PC games which really demand a mouse and keyboard (such as shooters, or RTS titles).
Apparently the growth in PlayStation controller usage has doubled from 10.9% of all controller sessions on Steam two years ago, to 21.6% of all sessions now.
If you’re keen to get your PS5 controller running on your PC right now, in Steam (as a PS4 controller, which is the current route outside of the beta client, obviously without the fancy functions) or indeed elsewhere, check out our how to use the PS5 DualSense controller on a PC article which covers exactly what to do.
Source: techradar.com