Valve continues to expand the range of controllers that can be used with Steam by adding support for the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons as part of its latest beta update.
Nintendo Switch Joy-Con support tops the very short list of changes in the Steam Client Beta community update post (opens in new tab) for August. Not only does the post confirm that Nintendo Switch Joy-Con support has been added, but it notes that support is for the Joy-Cons “both individually as mini-gamepads and combined in pairs.”
Currently, support is only in the Steam Client Beta. To sign up, you can do so in the “Account” section of the Steam settings menu. Since the beta was released on August 4th, Valve released it again on August 5th, hopefully smoothing out any issues that those trying to connect controllers were having.
Such joy
Of course, not every Nintendo Switch owner likes the tiny, crazy Joy-Cons. If you fall into this camp, or you’re just trying to figure out how to fix Joy-Con drift right now, then you’ll be happy to know that the more essential Nintendo Switch Pro controller has had Steam support from the start. in 2018.
Even more recently than that – June (opens in new tab)in fact – Valve added support for the Nintendo Switch Online classic controller collection in the Steam beta before pushing it to the main Steam client in July (opens in new tab). This collection includes the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, and Nintendo 64 wireless controllers. This latest beta notes that it offers “improved support” for those controllers as well.
All in all, this means that Steam now has a pretty complete support system for the official Nintendo Switch line of controllers. However, if Nintendo controller support isn’t your thing at all, Steam’s controller support is wide-ranging and also includes the DualSense Wireless Controller and the Xbox Elite Wireless Controller among others.
