If you have been eagerly waiting to get your hands on the new Steam Controller, you might want to pause and check your game library first. I was super excited to see Valve jumping back into the hardware game with a fresh design. The device looks incredible for navigating your vast Steam library of PC games. But there is a pretty massive catch if you like to play outside of Valve’s own digital storefront. There is a glaring flaw with this upcoming controller that could ruin the experience for a lot of gamers.
What is the big problem with the Steam Controller for PC gamers?
The issue comes down to how the device interacts with your computer. Just like the original version, the new Steam Controller has no native Windows drivers. This means the hardware relies entirely on the Steam app to function properly. If you do not have the game running via Valve’s storefront app, your shiny new gamepad turns into a useless piece of plastic.
This creates a massive headache for gamers using other storefronts like the Epic Store or even Xbox Game Pass. Games installed through the Xbox app are heavily locked down on Windows 11. Since the Valve client cannot see or hook into these locked files, it cannot pass your inputs to the game. Your Steam Controller simply will not do anything at all.
Let us say you want to play Forza Horizon 6 with your monthly Game Pass subscription. Right now, the only way to play it with this premium-priced gamepad is to just buy the full game directly from Steam. Valve could easily release normal Windows drivers to fix this for everyone. There are doubts that they would do so, wanting to keep users firmly planted in their ecosystem.
Thankfully, the gaming community has been down this road before with the original Steam controller. Back in the day, fans created a completely free tool called GlosSI that acted as a bridge and allowed the Steam Controller to work perfectly with every other application on your PC outside Steam.
The GlosSI tool is still available on GitHub today for original Steam controllers. Since the community has solved this exact problem before, we can fully expect them to do it again. Valve can resolve this with a quick software update to get everything working flawlessly, but for now, it is best to keep an eye on GlosSI because a possible fix might arrive soon.
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Edited by Ripan Majumdar
