09-26-2018, 10:05 PM
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/valve-...37853.html
Quote:Yet the sheer number of PC gamers using controllers is still interesting to consider. Valve said in a blog post:
"The first thing that jumps out in the data is that a lot of Steam players have a controller. Since 2015, over 30 million players have registered at least one controller and over 15 million of those players have registered more than one. Between accounts with multiple controllers and controllers that have been registered to multiple accounts, we find that a total of 60 million device-account pairs have been connected to Steam."
That's a lot of controllers. Valve said most are console gamepads that people have connected to their PCs; 45 percent are Xbox 360 controllers, 20 percent are PlayStation 4 controllers, 19 percent are Xbox One controllers, 7 percent are PlayStation 3 controllers and the remaining 8 percent fall under the "Other" category. That list is dominated by the Steam Controller, gamepads made specifically for PC, the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, and more.
Valve attributes the popularity of Xbox controllers largely to Microsoft's efforts to standardize XInput in Windows games. Many game developers have added support for XInput, which means setting up an Xbox controller is a lot easier than using one from PlayStation or Nintendo. That hasn't stopped a lot of people (the Pro Controller is surprisingly popular given that it's only a year old) but Xbox leads for a reason.
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But that reinforces Valve's point that a lot of Steam users rely on controllers. It would make sense for game developers to stop assuming that everyone on PC wants to use a keyboard and mouse, or even an Xbox gamepad, because in reality many other people use a large variety of input devices. It doesn't matter if one input method is objectively better; it doesn't make sense to ignore gamers with different preferences.