I keep seeing people gloss over the Steam Controller’s trackpads (and honestly, the same thing has been happening with the Steam Deck pretty much since launch), saying they’re not that useful and that they prefer sticks or whatever. The thing is, those trackpads are SO MUCH MORE than just something you aim with. They’re large touch-sensitive buttons that can detect exactly where your finger is, when it touches down, and when you lift it off. Combined with Steam Input, this gives you frankly almost infinite ways to use them.
My favorite use for them is radial menus. You can create one very easily: just go to your controller settings in-game, open Steam Input, and assign a radial menu to a trackpad. You can then assign anywhere from 1 to 20 buttons to it, organize them, add icons and colors... you can really make it your own.
The basic use case is something like mapping all your weapon slots (1–9), or maybe M, I, and J for map, inventory, and journal. But just to show you the potential, let’s take an extreme example.
You can map up to 20 buttons to each trackpad, right? And there are two trackpads. That’s 40 buttons. Now imagine using all four back buttons as action layer switches (pressing one changes how both trackpads behave). You could then have another set of 40 buttons for each back button. That’s the original 40 plus 160 from the back buttons = 200 buttons, all using just the trackpads and back buttons, without losing access to a single standard button.
That’s the power of the Steam Controller's trackpads. It’s not just something you use to move a cursor – it’s arguably the most versatile button you’ve ever had on a controller.
Mostly unrelated edit: No AI has been used while writing this. Made myself a coffee and spend good 20 minutes trying to make this organized and readable. It makes me a little sad that I'm getting called a bot for doing a PSA. Maybe try to ask yourselves in the future – why would AI write this? What would be the benefit? Why would anyone waste their tokens on it? I got 150k karma and a 10+ years old account, I'm doing this just to help people.
Also, it is no secret that AI influences the way we humans write and talk. For anyone interested in this, there's already at least one study on this topic. Maybe read it, and next time think about the reasoning behind using AI, instead of just looking for commonly used words that are common for a reason. /rant
