Hori has announced the release date of its officially licensed Steam controller in the US. The controller was originally released in Japan in October, but is now open for pre-orders in the US.
The Hori Wireless Horipad for Steam looks like an Xbox controller with more center buttons. The button in the very center is specifically for Steam and has the logo to match. The buttons next to the center are there to easily go through Steam menus. I’ve used Steam on an Xbox controller, and it can be pretty finicky when trying to use the Steam menu, so this seems like a big improvement.
There are touch sensors on the joysticks, which turn on the gyro function and can be mapped to other functions. There are also mappable back and bottom buttons, which is great for hotkeys. You can map everything from the Hori Device Manager.
Despite being specifically designed for Steam, with some resemblence to the now-discontinued Steam Controller, the controller doesn’t have a few features that might be considered standard in gaming controllers. This includes rumble packs, which were pretty much standard in the PS2 era, and a headset jack, which was standard by the PS4 era. There’s no trackpad either, but the touch control on the joystick might make up for that. This isn’t a huge setback, but not having a rumble pad by now is out of the norm.
Hori claims the controller can provide up to 12 hours of playtime on a single charge, which is about the average time for the Dualsense and Xbox Series X|S controller. There’s a USB Type-A cable included in the box, but the cable isn’t stuck to the controller, so you could swap it with a USB-C cable if needed.
The Hori Wireless Horipad is now available for pre-order on Amazon for $60, and will be available starting December 16th.
