Software exists to de-couple the original Steam controller from Steam itself, and under the hood it was just another xinput device with trackpads and gyro slapped on so if you plugged it in it was a mouse and a (bad) Xbox controller. It will likely be the same case for this one. It is true that you won’t be able to remap anything or adjust sensitivities without a software layer. It does not have to be Steam.
That kind of software is often a pain in the butt to set up or requires weird stuff you shouldn’t have to do like compiling code from source. They could easily have a button that just switches to XInput/DualSense mode on the controller, or acts as a standard HID device with some special steam controller sauce that applications could start supporting directly. But I think they just want to tie people to Steam in a vendor lock-in sort of way as another counter to other online stores like Epic (not that they’re even competing given how bad their software is).
Software exists to de-couple the original Steam controller from Steam itself, and under the hood it was just another xinput device with trackpads and gyro slapped on so if you plugged it in it was a mouse and a (bad) Xbox controller. It will likely be the same case for this one. It is true that you won’t be able to remap anything or adjust sensitivities without a software layer. It does not have to be Steam.
That kind of software is often a pain in the butt to set up or requires weird stuff you shouldn’t have to do like compiling code from source. They could easily have a button that just switches to XInput/DualSense mode on the controller, or acts as a standard HID device with some special steam controller sauce that applications could start supporting directly. But I think they just want to tie people to Steam in a vendor lock-in sort of way as another counter to other online stores like Epic (not that they’re even competing given how bad their software is).