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Number of Steam users playing with controllers has doubled in last two years

Number of Steam users playing with controllers has doubled in last two years

The number of people using controllers to play games on Valve's Steam platform has doubled in the last two years.

That's according to a blog post on the Steam website, where the firm was discussing support for the PlayStation 5 DualSense gamepad. Valve said that in "controller-friendly" titles, more than 60 per cent of users played with these input types. More people have been using PlayStation controllers recently, too, rather than the more typical Xbox One or 360 gamepad. 

"In the past two years, the number of daily average users playing a Steam game with a controller has more than doubled, with millions enjoying the growing catalogue of controller-friendly titles every day," Valve wrote.

"In controller friendly games, the percentage of players for that game that use a controller can easily be 60 per cent or higher. Some games, such as skateboarding games, have well over 90 per cent of their players using controllers in game. The growth in controller usage has been even higher among players using PlayStation controllers, which has grown in the past two years from 10.9% of controller play sessions to 21.6 per cent of all controller sessions across Steam."

Earlier in the year, titles that featured controller support dominated the Steam Top Sellers for July.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.