Features Developers: For the love of god, put controller support in your games ByKim Snaith 11 July 202411 July 2024
While I generally prefer gaming on a console, I’m not precious to one format. I’ll happily jump from Switch to PC to PS5 or Xbox and back again, depending where the games I want to play are at. And thanks to owning a gaming laptop, playing a game on Steam is super convenient: I don’t have to hog the TV, or worry about battery consumption like I would with a handheld. Only one thing frequently stands in my way of enjoying PC games: the lack of controller support.
Come on. It’s 2024. The fact that games still even exist without supporting controllers is baffling. Okay, okay: in some genres, I get it. A strategy game that involves a lot of clicking on troops and going through menus. Sure, keyboard and mouse makes sense there. I can even get behind a point and click game that doesn’t let me move my cursor around with a controller, and I can just about understand the PC-only FPS war sims that rely on mouse input for accuracy.
But anything else? Nay, there’s just no excuse. Nothing turns me off a game after to read those cursed words “Controllers not supported” on Steam.
I can’t be the only person who struggles to enjoy — or even get to grips with — some games that only support keyboard and mouse controls. Being brought up on a strict diet of purely console gaming, trying to control my character with WASD feels incredibly unnatural. Yes, a controller may be slower, clunkier to turn your character around, less accurate to aim, but in many games none of those things really matter. It’s simply the feel of having a controller in your hands that makes all the difference.
In the last week, I’ve had two new Steam games land in my inbox. Both of them I was excited to try, but that excitement was soon quashed when I saw that dreaded “This game wasn’t designed to support controllers” banner.
With how popular Steam Decks and other handheld PCs are at the moment, too, it seems even more short-sighted than ever. Sure, a Steam Deck does have touchpads to replicate mouse input, but it’s not the most intuitive or comfortable way to control a game. To truly target Steam Deck, a game needs to have full controller support.
The fact that more games than ever do have controller support is great: PC gaming has never been more accessible. But there’s still a long way to go. There are still far too many games that don’t support controllers, and it’s a huge barrier for many people wanting to enjoy games on PC. If you’ve grown up with PC games, it’s perhaps hard to see the issue: controlling a game with a keyboard and mouse is undoubtedly second nature to you (and even your preferred way of playing). But for other people, it’s a massive turn-off.
It’s an even bigger issue for those who game on laptops. Sure, you can plug a mouse in — but if you’re not sat at a desk, it’s almost impossible to use. But controlling a game on a trackpad? Has anyone mastered that yet? I bet not. Especially when games require some basic inputs that simple don’t exist on a laptop — like a mouse scroll wheel.
Steam’s going some way to battle the issue itself, thanks to its baked-in ability to remap controls. You can force a game to accept a controller input, with Steam configuring each button press and stick movement to a keyboard or mouse input. But it’s very hit-and-miss. Sometimes it works fine, and in other games it’s barely useable at all.
The only real solution? Developers, please release your games with controller support. You’re opening up your games to a much wider audience. And surely if you have even the tiniest inkling that you might release on console at some point, it makes sense to do some of that input legwork now?
