Yeah, I’ve been playing lot of 2d platformers on my Deck or button mashers like the Yakuza collection where I’m less likely to miss touchpads.

One of the things noticed when trying to set up an edge to edge swipe output a 180 was how inconsistent it turned out to be unless I changed the rotational angle to be corner to corner. Which is even less ergonomic than swiping naturally. Smaller surface area probably made the 180 less consistent too with how much further the camera moves with small movements.

I use dual touchpads for games like Doom Eternal, Left 4 Dead 2, Spin Rhythm XD, The Finals, etc.

I’d be sad to lose the left track pad since I use it for movement in games like Dying Light and Finals.

Touchpad is great for turns. Example here of 180 turn demo with my Steam Controller. And I use that with gyro to play games like Doom Eternal, Left 4 Dead 2, Spin Rhythm XD, The Finals, etc without aim assist.

Some functionality that keeps me using the Steam Controller has been touchpads for movement, quick gadget swapping with touchpads, quick 180s/gyro activation with touchpads.

I use it to play games like Doom Eternal, Left 4 Dead 2, Spin Rhythm XD, The Finals, etc.

Sadly I don’t find myself doing the same on the Steam Deck opting for the joysticks instead, since I don’t find the placement, smaller size, square versus circle, and flat surface versus concave offering the type of consistency that I use the touchpads for on the Steam Controller. It feels more a touchpad appropriate for slow paced games or just desktop navigation than optimal for the way I use the touchpads on the Steam Controller. And I don’t see Valve delivering on the touchpad end that I would like with the next Steam Controller with all the inputs it would be fitting in.

Some functionality that keeps me using the Steam Controller has been touchpads for movement, quick gadget swapping with touchpads, quick 180s/gyro activation with touchpads.

I use it to play games like Doom Eternal, Left 4 Dead 2, Spin Rhythm XD, The Finals, etc.

Sadly I don’t find myself doing the same on the Steam Deck opting for the joysticks instead, since I don’t find the placement, smaller size, square versus circle, and flat surface versus concave offering the type of consistency that I use the touchpads for on the Steam Controller. It feels more a touchpad appropriate for slow paced games or just desktop navigation than optimal for the way I use the touchpads on the Steam Controller. And I don’t see Valve delivering on the touchpad end that I would like with the next Steam Controller with all the inputs it would be fitting in.

I’m the minority that wishes the controller would have the same layout for the touchpads with it being large, circular, concave, and in the same upper positions.

I use dual touchpads on the Steam Controller to play games like Doom Eternal, Left 4 Dead 2, Spin Rhythm XD, The Finals, etc.

But, on the Deck I did not find the touchpad good for those games due to the shape, size, and placement so it turned out as being as useful as the dualsense with it becoming more a joystick controller than a touchpad controller I wanted to use in the same way I use the Steam Controller. Been hoping for years for a proper Steam Controller with upgraded gyro and 2 additional grips, but looks like it’ll never happen even if Valve came out with a new controller when it comes to a dual touchpad controller I want to use. Would be more a xbox/sony controller alternative.

If strong aim assist is present then that can outperform gyro, but that also can outperform a lot of mouse users to the point that even PC lobbies have mouse users abandoning mouse for aim assist supported inputs. So it depends on the level of aim assist. But, with aim assist removed from the equation gyro is better than joysticks and is surprisingly usable against mouse players despite the absence of auto aiming.

Do you encounter the same issue in desktop mode too?

I tried it on my steam deck and was able to apply my custom template to another game in the normal Steam Deck mode so I wonder if maybe the config is corrupted? Maybe make a simple test config template to check out if it applies to other games is worth trying before making your main config from scratch again.

Simplest way I think is saving the controller layout as a template and then you should be available to see in all games when you go to templates.

I do this for the Steam Controller where I saved a general template to use across games so I don’t need to reconfigure every single part from scratch.

I wish they made it easier to find games that support simultaneous mouse and game pad inputs, since I like to map mouse to gyro and ideally get analog joystick movement over having to map movement to WASD. And better if they put down whether the game supports locked glyphs so it isn’t switching between keyboard and gamepad icons due to detecting mouse and gamepad commands.

It is stable.

Steam Input for use with my steam controller and playstation controller for gyro controls. Particularly love the dual touchpads for movement and camera controls and extra click inputs over a single joystick click. I can’t deal with default control schemes anymore when it comes to controllers after becoming reliant on the amount of customization Steam Input provides, since it goes beyond a simple remapping with layers, modeshifts, chords, touch menus, action sets, etc.

Linux support that reduces need to fiddle around with settings and mess with lutris type tools and more devs putting in the time to try to be Steam Deck certified. Even when it doesn’t run well on the Deck for more demanding titles there is still benefit for more powerful systems and future Steam Deck follow up.

Existence of Steam forums and guides has come in useful for help and has popped up on search results that I wasn’t able to find on pcgamingwiki, so reddit isn’t the main place I need to rely on. Been a way to also try to reach devs without having to use reddit or twitter.

Steam workshop. I do use nexusmods, moddb, etc. But, sometimes just having it integrated into Steam makes it convenient.

Other launchers are more like comparing a dumbphone versus a smartphone where if all someone wants to do is make calls and text that is fine, but for those that have become accustomed to Steam launcher features beyond launching games there needs to be more done by competitors. Having to use stuff like GLOSSI to try and utilize Steam Input when using third party launchers, or have to fall back to syncthing to try and sync saves from other launchers when using Steam Deck just makes the lack of Linux and custom controller support apparent.