Valve has launched the Steam Spring Sale 2024 and with it, you know the drill, there's masses of discounts across all sorts of games. There's also a fresh list of the top 100 most played games on Steam Deck.
I think a big part of that, for me at least, is Steam Input plus the trackpads being an actually usable alternative to using a mouse to move a cursor.
Those two features have made countless games that I never imagined I’d be playing on a controller, let alone a portable device, completely playable.
Steam Input alone is such a killer feature that I rarely see people talking about. The amount of customization you can do on a game-by-game basis is actually kind of hard to believe.
Steam Input alone is such a killer feature that I rarely see people talking about. The amount of customization you can do on a game-by-game basis is actually kind of hard to believe.
For me it is specifically the system for easily sharing and browsing community customizations that makes the difference. Some people love to DIY everything, building tools and setups from the ground up for the fun of it rather than going straight to off the shelf stuff.
Me? Well I want to be that person but I am not. Sure, I slowly build customized setups for games I have played for 100 hours+ but if every game I played required first doing a lengthy translation of pc controls to steamdeck controls I just wouldn’t do it. The fact that I can quickly try 3-4 community control schemes and impulsively throw out the ones that aren’t intuitive to me until I find one that I can hit the ground running with and tweak as problems arise makes all the difference in the universe to me.
I have played hundreds of shooters with a controller for wayyyy too many hours, I know how shooter controls should be mapped, if I try out a control scheme for a shooter on the deck and none of the buttons do what I expect them to do I don’t need to pull up the control editing scheme and start digging down into the settings to change stuff, I just pull up another community control scheme and try the buttons and repeat until I find one where the buttons I intuitively expect to do something generally do that thing.
the trackpads being an actually usable alternative to using a mouse to move a cursor.
I have to say, I loathe trackpads as input devices almost universally. Somehow, Valve’s hardware designers managed to implement trackpads that I actually like. It’s impressive.
I think a big part of that, for me at least, is Steam Input plus the trackpads being an actually usable alternative to using a mouse to move a cursor.
Those two features have made countless games that I never imagined I’d be playing on a controller, let alone a portable device, completely playable.
Steam Input alone is such a killer feature that I rarely see people talking about. The amount of customization you can do on a game-by-game basis is actually kind of hard to believe.
For me it is specifically the system for easily sharing and browsing community customizations that makes the difference. Some people love to DIY everything, building tools and setups from the ground up for the fun of it rather than going straight to off the shelf stuff.
Me? Well I want to be that person but I am not. Sure, I slowly build customized setups for games I have played for 100 hours+ but if every game I played required first doing a lengthy translation of pc controls to steamdeck controls I just wouldn’t do it. The fact that I can quickly try 3-4 community control schemes and impulsively throw out the ones that aren’t intuitive to me until I find one that I can hit the ground running with and tweak as problems arise makes all the difference in the universe to me.
I have played hundreds of shooters with a controller for wayyyy too many hours, I know how shooter controls should be mapped, if I try out a control scheme for a shooter on the deck and none of the buttons do what I expect them to do I don’t need to pull up the control editing scheme and start digging down into the settings to change stuff, I just pull up another community control scheme and try the buttons and repeat until I find one where the buttons I intuitively expect to do something generally do that thing.
I have to say, I loathe trackpads as input devices almost universally. Somehow, Valve’s hardware designers managed to implement trackpads that I actually like. It’s impressive.