Apparently 48 million players have used a controller with a game on Steam.

That's according to Valve, which revealed the figure in a post about new Steamworks functionality that lets developers and publishers see what gamepads people are using to play their games. That 48 million figure is a relatively low percentage of the one billion-plus Steam accounts that have been set up.

The PC giant says that around 10 per cent of players on a given day are using a controller, though Valve says that, unsurprisingly, some genres see higher gamepad usage than others.

"Many RTS games, are hard to play with a controller of any kind and tend to have a much smaller percentage of players using a controller (frequently below one per cent)," Valve wrote.

"In contrast, many sports and fighting games see over 70 per cent of sessions played with a controller, while racing and skating games can easily have over 90 per cent of players using a controller. On the action and adventure fronts, most third person adventure games see 40-to-50 per cent of players using a controller, and the majority of FPS games are solidly in the range of seven-to-eight per cent."

In November of last year, Valve revealed that the number of people playing Steam games with controllers had doubled since 2018. This news came as the company improved support for the PlayStation 5's DualSense controller.