I'm curious what percentage of people actually use controllers on the PC.
I was curious about that myself.
I re-posted some Steam statistics in the article. The numbers are a bit surprising.
Indeed they are.
"As Steam updates its store page it has also provided analytics regarding controller use with games on PC. Over 3 billion players used a controller on PC in the last year, up from 990 million in 2019, with 60% using an Xbox controller and 27% using a PlayStation controller. Steam has said that the remaining percent is made up of other controllers, the Steam Deck and Switch Pro."
I briefly tinkered with using a Sony BT controller back around 2010 but stopped because it involved uninstalling Windows/MS BT drivers to reinstall Sony's but I doubt that's an issue for their current controllers, although I don't really know.
That sounds like the PS3 days. I recall getting PS3 controllers (SIXAXIS and DualShock 3) to work via Bluetooth on Windows PCs was a serious pain in the @ss back then (I had friends and family who messed around with doing that). The sh1t you described about dealing with the BT drivers and BT stacks was part of it. DualShock 4s work okay enough on PC (both wired and wireless), but you wanna use something like Steam with its Steam Input API or programs like DS4Windows to really properly use them. DualSense controller natively works on PC (and since the controller came out before the PS5 did, people were using it with PC before PS5), but not to the same extent as Xinput-based controllers (again you wanna use Steam Input or stuff like DS4Windows to get the most of them). Also for those games that support DualSense controller features, you MUST go with a wired connection. None of that sh1t works if you use the controller via Bluetooth.
I was a huge fan of the PS1/PS2 controllers back in the day...
Wooooow, always very surprising to me when I find people who actually liked the first 3 generations of DualShock controllers. Whenever I use my PS3 I don't even use my DualShock 3 controllers anymore, I use Wii U Pro Controllers. One thing I liked about PS3 is that it supported DirectInput controllers, so I used some of those (like my USB Sega Saturn controllers) on PS3 a decent amount.
I tried a bunch of junk before them, back in the D-input/X-input or whatever it was that MS had going on back then (2000-2010) and that really sucked since button mappings and stick controls were all over the place. When they implemented the Xbox controller into Windows it was huge improvement to me. Things, finally, just worked.
Yeah you're talking about the days of DirectInput. I remember those days well. There was no standard for dealing with controller usage on PC yet. Back in the last few years of that era, I was using Saitek controllers (like the P2500 and P3000) which kept breaking and failing on me. Those days were so annoying, as controller support was some real @ss. When Microsoft migrated Xinput over from X360 to PC as part of DirectX, making the X360 controller the default, standard controller for Windows, it was a godsend. Things have been wonderful for controller support on PC ever since. Like you said, "Things, finally, just worked". I bought an X360 controller 3 years before I even had an X360 console to use on PC. Game devs got on board with that sh1t pretty quickly too (especially since 7th-gen was when we entered the age of consoles being the lead development platform for most video games, with X360 being the lead console for that gen, and devs were just porting their games over to PC rather than properly designing them for PC).
Of course we're talking wired connections here. Wireless was more of an issue. With X360 controllers and early revisions of the XB1 controllers, you had to use Microsoft's custom wireless receivers. Eventually XB1 controllers got Bluetooth support. But Nintendo and Sony been had Bluetooth support ever since their 7th-gen systems launched.
I use an Xbox series x controller. For driving games and games where it just works better.
For games where I use a controller instead of mouse+kb, XBSX controller is my main controller these days (before that it was XB1 controller and X360 controller). But I have a ton of different controllers that I use depending on the game. Some games I prefer to use Switch Pro Controller or Wii U Pro Controller. I'd use my Logitech G27 racing wheel controller a lot more if I had a proper seating setup for it. I use the Switch SNES controllers too, and I have adapters to hook up NES, SNES, and NES/SNES Mini/Classic controllers on PC as well. I have USB versions of Genesis and Saturn controllers too (and yeah these are official Sega ones, although some were made in partnership with a 3rd-party, RetroBit). But yeah most of the time I'm using my XBSX controller. There have also been a few rare games where I will use both mouse+kb
and a controller, depending on what I am doing in the game.
I certainly never have, except for in NES emulators
While I still have every console I've ever gotten (except my mom's Atari 2600 which was lost during a move in 1989), and while I prefer playing on the original hardware in general, I still make
heavy use of emulation. So yeah, a good amount of my controller usage on PC is for use with emulators.
Getting old sucks, arthritis sets in.
Stuff like that is why my mom got out of gaming. Now I'm at the age where this is a concern for me too (well it's been that way for years already). I find that it doesn't matter if it's a mouse, a keyboard, or a controller,
all of them f*ck with my hands. Yeah dawg, getting old sucks.
