Steam Now Supports The Dual Shock 4, Get The Details

Sony's DualShock 4 is considered to be one of the best controllers that Sony has ever produced. The controller is extremely popular and Valve has announced that Steam has been updated to natively support the controller right out of the box.

Over on the official Steam news page they announced that the Steam client has been updated with a lot of new features, but the one feature that stood out most to everyone within the gaming circles was the fact that the Steam client now has native DualShock 4 support. This means that you can take your PS4 controller, plug it into your PC, activate Big Picture mode and select the PS4 controller from the controller test settings, similar to how you setup the Steam Controller.

This move comes after Valve realized that a lot of people are playing Steam games with the PS4's controller, but they admitted a few months ago that support for the controller was limited and that they would focus on changing that.

The highlight here isn't just that the PS4's DualShock 4 has native Steam support, but it's that Valve has implemented software API features to allow gamers to customize the DualShock 4's layout functionality with the same level of layered depth as the Steam Controller. Yes, this means that you can make functionality to the internal gyro, the touchpad on the center of the controller, the two analog sticks, the left and right triggers, the left and right bumpers, the face buttons, the start and select buttons and the analog push buttons.

Gamers can also customize radial menus for the PS4's handy wireless controller, as well as setup custom action sets that can be relayed through specific button prompts, and even create dynamic touch menus based on manually configured layouts. Anyone who has a Steam Controller and knows the kind of depth that's possible with that controller, will know exactly what sort of options are afforded to the DualShock 4.

And, just like with the Steam Controller's gyro and accelerometer features, these can also be adjusted in the DualShock 4 using integrated IMUs into the API without requiring additional hardware.

What's more is Steam allows gamers to modify these configurations and save them so that you can share and spread them around depending on the kind of games you play. Heck, if you don't have time to save or create profiles, you can also use the Steam controller configurator to download profiles based on your controller preferences.

Even more than that is the fact that they've added LED options explicitly for the DualShock 4, so that you can customize the LED brightness and color scheme of the controller based on the kind of actions you want it to display. This is great for the hearing impaired who may need indicators about certain sound-related contextual actions that can be displayed through the LED configurations.

Another really cool feature is that they've fixed the rumble preference, so you can easily enable or disable the preference for a controller. When used in wireless mode, I was having trouble with the Steam Controller's rumble, so it's nice to know that they've addressed this issue.

You can also opt-in and opt-out of using a Steam default controller configuration for a designated controller, which is useful if you don't like the default controller settings for a specific game. The reason they have the default option set on is because if a game natively supports the PS4's DualShock 4, then Steam will use that configuration so you can play the game identical to the way you were able to play it on the PS4.

Valve really seems to like going out of their way to ensure that the quality of life and service settings are always top notch, even for hardware and devices they don't make. The latest update for the Steam client featuring the DualShock 4 features is available right now.