Valve Aims To Have Games Like Dota 2 Playable With The Steam Controller

There are some games which play better with a console controller, and there are games that are impossible to play without a keyboard and mouse setup, but it hasn’t stopped developers from trying. Now as you might have heard, Valve has recently unveiled a host of Steam Machines at CES 2014 where there will be as many as 13 different versions to choose from, and all of which will come bundled with the Steam Controller which is admittedly rather uniquely shaped. Will all games be compatible with the Steam Controller? Well perhaps not and Valve’s Dota 2 is probably not one of them. Speaking to Polygon at CES, Valve engineer Jeff Bellinghausen stated that games such as Dota 2 required a fair amount of keyboard input, making it a pretty complicated process to try and incorporate those inputs into the Steam Controller.

However he also admits that being able to play games like Dota 2 on the couch and on a large screen display, like a television, would be a really neat opportunity. Despite new API support, Bellinghausen does not believe it will be possible to full replicate the keyboard and mouse experience on the controller, but believe that they are 90% of the way there. “What we’re trying to do is find a way to get close to that performance, but [from] your couch. That’s the goal, to get close to that performance level.” Given that Steam is a platform of PC games, it is natural that not all games were designed for controller support in mind, but will Valve be able to pull this off? We guess we will just have to wait and see.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Steam (Valve), Steam Machines, Valve