Modern games employ pretty much every digit on both your hands, and of course your eyes and ears. Throw in some multiplayer communication and you get your voice in on the action, too. And if you’re streaming to an audience, you have all that to manage, plus keeping a bunch of people engaged and managing a chatroom. Elgato, now a subsidiary of Corsair, makes tools like the Stream Deck to help keep all of that in line. The company’s latest gadget engages a part of your body you might not have thought about before now.
The Stream Deck Pedal is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a set of USB-connected pedals that go underneath your desk, within easy reach of your feet. The gadget includes three pedals (a big one in the center is a little less obvious) bound to just about anything you can think to do within a game, Discord, Twitch, or any associated programs. Users can bind the pedals to three separate actions, and use program profiles to expand that based on whatever’s running in the foreground.
This isn’t the first pedal input for PCs, of course—driving game fans have had car-style pedals for years, and various vendors have offered USB pedals that can be bound to different applications, and foot controls are popular for musicians who have no free hands. But Elgato’s pedal is the first one you might see on, say, a Best Buy shelf, and it fits in with the company’s dedication to making it easier to manage a one-person live stream setup. It’s technically possible to use the pedal in a game, or any other application, should it strike your fancy. Elgato’s software can set up sequences of actions bound to pedal presses, a la a programmable universal remote.
Elgato wants $90 for the Stream Deck Pedal, which seems like a lot at first glance. But the gadget has some surprisingly high-end components: a “heavy-duty” chassis with anti-slip texture, removable USB-C cable, and interchangeable springs to let the user customize the necessary activation pressure. The gadget is compatible with Windows and macOS, and it’s on sale now, though the Elgato store is showing it as out of stock at the time of writing.
Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.
