Valve continues to expand the range of controllers that can be used with Steam by adding support for Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons as part of the newest beta update.
Nintendo Switch Joy-Con support is at the top of the very short list of changes in the Steam Client Beta community update post (opens in new tab) for August. Not only does the post confirm that Nintendo Switch Joy-Con support has been added, it notes that the support is for Joy-Cons “both individually as a mini-gamepad and combined into pairs”.
At the moment, the support is just in the Steam Client Beta. To opt into that you can do so in the ‘Account’ section of the Steam settings menu. Since the beta was released on August 4, Valve has re-released it on August 5, hopefully smoothing out any issues that were being experienced by those trying to connect the controllers.
What a joy
Of course, it’s not every Nintendo Switch owner that likes the petite, fiddly Joy-Cons. If you fall into that camp, or you’re just trying to figure out how to fix Joy-Con drift at the moment, then you’ll be glad to know that the more substantial Nintendo Switch Pro controller got Steam support all the way back in 2018.
Even more recently than that – June (opens in new tab), in fact – Valve added support for the collection of Nintendo Switch Online classic controllers to the Steam beta before pushing it out to the main Steam client in July (opens in new tab). This collection comprises the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64 wireless controllers. This most recent beta release notes that it brings “improved support” for these controllers too.
Altogether, this means that Steam now has a pretty comprehensive system of support for the official range of Nintendo Switch controllers. If Nintendo controller support is of absolutely no interest to you, though, Steam’s controller support is wide-ranging and also includes the DualSense wireless controller and the Xbox Elite wireless controller among others.