Great news for Steam gamers with Sony PlayStation controllers. Steam now fully supports all the functionalities of the Sony DualSense and DualShock 4 controllers, including haptic feedback and touchpad capabilities.
Previously, the controller support for the Sony controllers was only partially supported – you get full joystick and button controls, but you can’t use the useful touchpad with selected games running on Steam or experience haptic feedback using the rumble motors.
Filter for DualSense or DualShock in the Steam Store
Additionally, you can now browse your Steam Library to see which games have full access to the features of DualShock and DualSense thanks to the upgraded Controller-friendly Hub. You can now explore by controller type to see which games are optimized for the Sony stuff. Steam can even set a filter based on the type of controller you played with recently.
On the store page, there is now more detail on games that support the three controller models with a significant player base: Xbox, DualSense, and DualShock. For game developers, there is a new category for games that make full use of the Steam Input API which allows any of more than 200 devices to work well with the game.
The filtering also works when searching for a game, where you can filter for games that have support for controllers or make use of a particular type of controller you prefer.
Steam has helpfully placed a direct button to the controller configuration page, conveniently located next to the settings and information buttons on the play bar in the in-game overlay. All the features above are also present and updated on Steam’s Big Picture Mode.
More Sony controllers on Steam
The company also shared some interesting statistics. In the past year, there were over 3 billion game sessions that included a controller in one way or another. The breakdown is as follows:
- 60% Xbox controller
- 27% PlayStation models
- The remaining % is made up of Steam Deck, Switch Pro, and hundreds of other controllers models
In the same period four years ago, PlayStation controllers only made up 19% of the total number. That is a 4x increase in a time period of four years. That is no surprise however as with over 117 million units of PlayStation 4 and over 40 million units of PlayStation 5 sold worldwide so far, it is bound that extra units of the DualSense and DualShock 4 controllers will be lying around somewhere, and someone would want to use it for their Steam gaming sessions.
