For any game that supports a gamepad, there's not much reason to use the Steam Controller instead of just plugging in an Xbox or PlayStation peripheral. The trackpad can give you more fine-grained control, but it's not an inherently better system, and the giant trackpads mean that your face buttons are stuck awkwardly at the bottom of the controller. I tried a few minutes of Shadow of Mordor, The Talos Principle, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and I'd rather have had a traditional controller for all of them.



Instead, its strength is in its versatility. Valve had precisely one non-controller game on display, and it was late-'90s shooter System Shock 2, which has a particularly weird mouse-and-keyboard interface; it's the kind of game where you equip a weapon by hitting one of a half-dozen hotkeys or physically dragging it onto your character. And, surprisingly, it was pretty decent. The right trackpad worked precisely as a mouse, and Valve has designed an impressively customizable control-mapping system; not only can you change the binding of any pad or button, you can control things like trackpad sensitivity, vibration intensity, and the inertia of a finger swipe. Valve will let you share custom binding systems, which solves a lot of the setup problems for any game with a substantive fan base.