Steam reveals support for Sony controllers

In the latest update to Valve’s Steam game program, the platform welcomes Sony under the heat, or at least the company’s consoles. In addition to support for Microsoft’s Xbox controllers, Valve is expanding with better support for Dualshock and Dualsense controllers, i.e. the Playstation’s hand controllers.

It is already possible to use Sony’s various manual controls. For example, Valve opened up Steam’s input API for Dualsense back in 2020. The biggest differences in the update are mainly about making support more visible and helping players find games that work with the controllers.

Each game’s store page gets the addition of special icons that indicate which consoles the game supports. Games also get clearer detailed information about whether or not the developer recommends playing the game with a controller and how complete support is. In addition, there is a special page for all games that fully support Steam’s input API.

About 12 percent of all gamers use a handheld console

The fact that Steam is expanding and clarifying support for controllers is, in short, a growing interest from gamers. According to Valve, about 12 percent of all gamers use a controller regularly. For some single-player games, including ball sports games, more than 80 percent of players use a controller.

Last year, more than 3 billion gaming sessions were said to have involved a console. Of these, 60 percent were Xbox consoles, while about 27 percent were Playstation consoles of some sort. The remaining lineage is said to be a mix between Valve’s Steam Deck, Nintendo’s Switch Pro console, and “hundreds of other models.”

Four years ago, the number was just 990 million, of which 76 percent were Xbox consoles and only 19 percent were Playstation consoles. Steam believes that the number of sessions with Playstation consoles has quadrupled, so it’s time to seriously include it.