If you’re a massive fan of all things Nintendo, you’re going to love this tidbit: Steam has been kitted out with support for Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con Controllers.
Nintendo has a lot of hardware, more so than most other console manufacturers. The latest Steam update, which is still in its beta phase, focuses primarily on extended support for Nintendo’s numerous hardware setups. First off, the new Steam update adds support for the widely-used Joy-Cons. Secondly, the new update also ships with improved support for the plethora of modernized classic Nintendo controllers that have been showing up everywhere in recent years.
Valve addressed the new update to its Steam client with a short and incredibly concise set of patch notes. The gist of these was that the update exclusively affects players with a proclivity for Nintendo controllers. This is a particularly exciting update given that Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons now have expanded functionality outside of the Nintendo realm. They are, therefore no longer a niche purchase and rather significantly expand the ways in which players can interact with the games they purchase on Steam.
Here are the expanded patch notes, just in case we’ve missed anything:
Steam Client Beta August 4th
- Added support for Nintendo Joy-Con controllers, both individually as a mini-gamepad and combined into pairs
- Improved support for the Nintendo Online classic controllers
There you have it, the full patch notes for the latest Steam update.
Given that these are additions to the beta version of the Steam client, you’ll need to opt-in to test new features before you see them active. However, these additions should make it into the next stable update of Steam, so if you’re in no rush to see how this extended Nintendo controller support is going to affect your playstyle, you won’t be missing out on much.
If the new update isn’t going to change anything other than extended support for Nintendo controllers, why does it actually matter? Well, honestly, it’s all a matter of personal preference. Some gamers prefer to tackle Steam games with the now-supported DualSense controllers or newer controllers for Xbox consoles.
Other gamers prefer the simplicity or nostalgia associated with the legacy Nintendo controllers. This way, if you want to try them out and see what all the rage with these older controllers is, now you can. And if you have no interest, these updates will be nothing more than two lines of text in a set of patch notes.
In other Steam news, Steam Deck users may get banned for playing certain popular games.
