Steam Controller is $5 (+shipping)

Steam's autumn sale is on and the Steam Controller is at the cheapest i've ever seen it so if you're curious about the thing $5+shipping maybe the right price to experiment with the thing. They claim the quantity is limited so i'm curious if they're going to stop production of the Steam Controller. (I've heard that this is a last batch discontinuation sale) As a fan of the SC i can only hope this mean's they'll be working on a 2.0 version soon.

Steam Controller Autumn Sale

For those wanting a personal opinion and some clarifications as to whether the Steam Controller is right for you i'll say, despite what you may have heard from the Giant Bomb crew, the controller works great for a large spectrum of games, yes, including FPS games. The only game i've run into that i couldn't really use it for at all was a typing game Hacknet and i would say twin stick shooters can be fussy with it and require a lot of tweaking on a per-game basis. Everything else works just fine.

However, if you require that plug and play experience, The Steam Controller may now be for you. There are many options to choose templates and other users profiles, but templates honestly doesnt often showcase what makes the SC great and are a very basic 1:1 emulation of a standard game controller, and User created content tends to be a crap shoot. Hell even official configs by the game devs can often be pretty poor.

If you're willing to learn the configuration software, Steam Input, you will be very exited by the possibilities that the SC offer. You'll get the laid-back comfort of a traditional controller with far greater capability and precision than a basic controller can have once you've grown accustom to using the SC to you're personal specs.

I've programmed controller configs for many genre of games, FPS, RPG, RTS, Fighting games, platformers, racing/driving games/sims, games with various distinct control situations such as Arma 3/Battlefield 3 type games, hell, i've even programmed the Steam Controller to fly jets and helicopters in Digital Combat Simulator. There's not much you can throw at the SC that simply won't work. As i said, twin stick shooters are finicky to program but not impossible.

i have a few gripes with some bugs/designs choices on the software side of the SC that only people who configure a lot of complex profiles will even notice. I've been using the thing since it was first released four years ago and still use it, almost exclusively, to play games on today.

I highly recommend checking one out while you still can at this super low price.

For programming tutorials i'll recommend The ExistentialEgg youtube channel.

For questions you can try the Steam Controller page on Reddit

I game pretty much exclusively on PC these days and my usually with mouse and keyboard. I do still bust out the old 360 elite and wireless dongle on occasion, but this will probably suit me just fine. Hard to argue against at least giving it a shot when it cost more to ship it than buy it.

For my two cents, I exclusively played Dead Cells with this controller, no fuss about it. Hitman was another notable game I used this controller on but I tended to avoid shootouts in that case. Civ is a fantastic use for the Steam controller as well! Not having to swap mouse and keyboard with my wife on a hotseat game is great! I couldn't wrap my head around 1st and 3rd person shooting with the Steam controller though; having only recently discovered Steam's controller support, I've been using my PS4 controller to play Control, for example.

Good write up. I bought the controller when it initially launched, but never ended up giving it a proper chance. So i sold it. But seeing it on sale again i bought it again. So this time I am going to put the XBOX One controller and DualShock 4 far away so i can give it a proper chance.

Seen many say the learning curve is somewhere between 14 days to a few months.

It's a shame they've sold out forveer. I could have used one of those

I use the Steam controller for 90% of my PC-gaming these days.

The main reason I bought one was to play strategy games and point-and-click adventure games (+ other puzzle games), which rarely have gamepad support. For example, I've used it with Total War Rome 2, Age of Wonders 3, Endless Space 2, Cities Skylines, Unavowed, etc. There is a learning curve, especially with something complex like Total War, but nothing you can't become good at.

It's super-easy to set the key bindings and make your own mapping, if a game lacks official Steam controller mappings. Usually though, somebody in the game's community will already have made a mapping for the game. In fact, I often have several pre-made mappings to try out, to see what I like the most. It depends on the game of-course, bigger titles like Total War or Euro Truck will offer a big list of pre-made community-made mappings, while smaller Indie titles will have few or zero pre-made mappings, where you'll have to make your own.

There's also a number of pre-set "core" mappings for all the main gameplay styles; fps, mouse and keyboard, third-person, etc.

Lastly, you can change the bindings on the fly, even while you are playing the game. It's really smooth and efficient.

I bought one a couple of years ago and absolutely hated it. Returned it after a week.

Probably fair to so I didn't try very hard to make it do what I wanted, but at this point I'm very happy with a lapboard.

I love my steam controller and I think it's the best thing for ARPG's (most of them) and Strategy games. The buttons on the back are actually my favorite thing about it because I can use them as modifiers for games with too many keyboard commands.

I would buy another one if it wasn't for the shipping cost, it will be more than the cost of the controller. Sad to see them go, I really love mine and wish they'd have made a new better version.

@oursin_360: Honestly - it bums me out that the next gen console controllers will be identical to the current (assuming the Stadia controller is an indication of what to expect).

The back petals on the Steam Controller are amazing, and I wish every controller had them. The Elite Controller's back petals were a bit too touchy, but the Steam Controller ones were perfect, imo.

Any who - sorry to those that didn't get to jump on this deal. This is now my 3rd steam controller. I'm really hoping they make a newer version, but if not, I'll gladly settle for this.