The Nintendo Switch‘s Joy-Con controllers will soon be added to the list of fully supported third-party devices on Steam, as announced by Valve via its community page. For now, the company is currently running tests on the device’s compatibility as part of the latest beta for its platform.
According to Valve, Joy-Cons can be used as a matched pair and even individually, similar to how you can use them either way when gaming on the Switch. Which is actually pretty handy, as this allows you to pass one side of the controller to a friend in order to play games with co-op modes on Steam, such as Streets of Rage 4 or Broforce.
However, it is not known if Steam will add in support for the Switch controller’s HD Rumble feature at this time. Even so, this is still dependent on whether certain games will be compatible with the ability, much like the DualSense. On that note, there are currently a handful of titles on the platform that are capable of providing full support for the Sony controllers’ features, such as haptic feedback and adaptive triggers.
Another unique Joy-Con feature that is very unlikely to be supported is its motion-based controls. Not necessarily a bad thing, as there aren’t any games on Steam that relies on this ability to begin with. Of course, this is not counting VR-based games, which instead require specific motion controllers such as those for the Oculus, HTC Vive and Valve Index.
Valve did not mention when the support for Joy-Cons are expected to be publicly available on the platform. Seeing that the feature is currently in beta testing means that a rollout could happen in a couple of weeks or even months. That being said, fingers crossed that a good number of games on Steam, especially those that are also available on the Nintendo Switch, will support this capability.
(Source: Valve [Steam community page])
