The Steam Autumn and Holiday Sales have come and gone, and so have the Steam Awards which was held for the very first time this year. Grand Theft Auto V and Euro Truck Simulator 2 were, by far, the most popular, snagging 2 category wins each! Excitingly, additional controller support will be coming, at last! At least, to the Client Beta which is available to those participating. This patch was implemented a couple days ago, with quite a few changes aside from that. This also includes changes to the overlay and improvements on Linux soft and hardware interactions with the client.

It’s not as if the library is deprived of titles with full or partial controller capabilities. Games such as Rocket League, ARK, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are very popular games with Steam’s controller support. Rather, over 3,000 games are capable of doing so. Out of almost 12,000, that is a relatively small number. So far, only the PlayStation 4 and Steam Controller have had the complete luxury treatment. Highlighted by two asterisks (**) under the subject labeled “Steam Controller”, below is the patch note released by Valve employee, Alfred. It states:

Added XBox 360, Xbox One, and Generic X-Input controller configurator support. This allows all recognized controller types to use the advanced mapping features of the Steam Controller Configurator. Note that because X-Input currently lacks per-controller means of unique identification, all controllers of that type will share personalization and configuration settings.

What does all that confusing language mean? Well, you may have already guessed it, but that means almost any controller or game pad can be customized and utilized in for games in Steam. Be it the PlayStation 4 or Xbox controller – the buttons can be configured to your liking. Other awesome changes have arrived too! Check out the full details below:

General

• Made the error clearer when you fail to install a game and don’t have enough disk space due to user quotas

Big Picture

• Added support for using the overlay keyboard for games that have launchers
• Improved display when running on retina enabled devices under macOS

Linux

• Improved interactions between the Steam runtime and host distribution libraries, which should let Steam work out of the box with open-source graphics drivers on modern distributions. If using an older distribution or running into problems, use STEAM_RUNTIME_PREFER_HOST_LIBRARIES=0 to revert to previous behavior.
• Unify close-to-tray behavior with other platforms. If using a distribution that doesn’t have proper compatible tray support, use STEAM_FRAME_FORCE_CLOSE=0
• Added idle detection, friend status will now automatically switch to Away/Snooze
• Fixed Steam not obeying SIGTERM, Steam will now gracefully exit when logging out of a session
• Fixed keyboard input and cursor switching in overlay for Vulkan applications
• Update Vulkan loader in the Steam runtime to enable Xlib support
• Updated libxcb in the runtime with a fix for DRI3-related crashes on open-source graphics drivers

Steam Client Beta Update – Jan 5th https://t.co/nH782FASkf

— Steam Client Beta (@SteamBeta) January 5, 2017

Steam Controller

• **Added XBox 360, Xbox One, and Generic X-Input controller support. This allows all recognized controller types to use the advanced mapping features of the Steam Controller Configurator. Note that because X-Input currently lacks per-controller means of unique identification, all controllers of that type will share personalization and configuration settings. As they share the same inputs, Xbox 360/One/Generic controllers will all see each-others configurations when browsing. Automatic conversion will be attempted when loading configurations from other controller types.
• Unrecognized Generic X-Input gamepad style controllers will be recognized by the Steam Controller Configurator once their buttons have been assigned to match a generic gamepad layout.
• Recommended configurations specified for a game by the developer will now attempt to assign based on Controller Type.
• Added option to disable Guide Button issuing a Steam focus change. This is available through the Big Picture controller options menu. This allows better interoperability with other applications which use the Guide Button, such as PSNow.
• Added Single Button simple button mode for trackpads. This allows a trackpad to be treated as a single giant button.
• Fix for free-floating On Screen Keyboard running very slowly if a game was open but did not have focus or was running windowed.
• Added independent horizontal/vertical scaling to joystick move and joystick mouse.
• Joystick Move mode no longer shows mouse sensitivity option unless mouse output is selected.
• Added additional support for third party PS4 controllers, including some HORI, MadCatz, and Armor pads and fight sticks.
• Fixed a bug with PS4 triggers where they were being scaled incorrectly, leading to maxing out of the value too soon.
• Added ability to change x-input controller order from the Controller Options menu – so in multi-controller setups of x-input games, the mapping of phyiscal controller to x-input index can be swapped around. Note that this currently only applies to controllers that have opted into Steam Controller Configurator support.
• Fixed Configurator Switch Controller interface not showing controller icons.
• Re-enabled Gamepad outputs for desktop configurations for users of third party programs which hook into applications via the desktop configuration.

Steam Overlay

• Fixed incorrect colors in screenshots and In-Home Streaming for Vulkan applications on AMD hardware

Want to find out how you can be part of the Steam Client Beta and try out the customizable controller support? All you need to do in order to opt in is simply change a single Steam setting. Check out the simple directions in the Valve Developer Community Wiki page here! Not feeling up to selecting a hyperlink? No worries. Check out the three step process, as follows:

1. Open up the Steam client. In the upper right-hand corner, click on “Steam” then “Settings”. It should lead you directly to the Account page. If not, go ahead and click on it.
2. Right below the option to “Change Contact Email Address…” should be a section titled “Beta Participation: Steam Beta Update.” Click on the Change button.
3. Click on the drop-down menu underneath “Beta Participation,” and select “Steam Beta Update”.

There you have it! Will you be trying be participating in the beta process to test out the new changes? What do you think of the controller support? Hoping it will make it past the beta? Let us know what you think in the comments section below, we would love to hear from you! Don’t forget to follow Don’t Feed the Gamers on Twitter and Facebook to keep up on all the gaming news as it happens.