Valve has officially announced that the PS5’s DualSense controller is now supported in Steam. Games using the Steam Input API can now recognize the controller and display the correct button prompts. They’ll also be able to access the DualSense’s LED, trackpad, rumble, and gyro features, though there’s no mention of support for its adaptive triggers. The functionality is currently available in Steam’s public beta client, with plans for a full release “after further testing.”
Steam has been gradually rolling out support for the DualSense over the past couple of weeks. It started by adding support for the controller itself, before adding and refining compatibility with advanced features like its trackpad, rumble, and gyro. Valve doesn’t mention anything about the DualSense’s adaptive triggers, so we assume that the Input API doesn’t yet support that technology. If so, we can’t complain too much the number of games that actually make use of the adaptive triggers is very low at the moment.
According to Valve, the amount of players who use controllers to play PC games rather than a mouse and keyboard has more than doubled in the past two years, with bigger increases coming from those using PlayStation controllers.
For now, if you want to try out the functionality for yourself, you’ll have to opt into the Steam client beta. The controller can be connected via Bluetooth or with a USB-C cable.
