These controllers were all working on SteamOS before as far as I know, so I’m interested to see what this changes. My understanding is that previously their controllers just show up as generic xbox controllers, and now they will be properly recognized. We’ll see if this has any other benefits like custom bindings for back buttons and things like that.
The issue is that the back paddles weren’t unique buttons. You could configure them to press existing buttons, (like telling it to press A when you hit the right paddle,) but they weren’t listed as individual inputs. Now they are, so you can actually map unique actions to L4, R4, etc… This is particularly important for games that have a lot of unique inputs. Plenty of games are optimized for controller, but lots still rely on having more buttons (on a keyboard) than what a traditional controller has.
Honestly I’d love to see more of this. Wheels and panels as well, not just gamepads. I’ve always wished for fully assignable controller support where the icon and HUDs etc change, ETS2 is looks so much better now that the icons don’t flicker twice per second because of my hodgepodge DS4Windows control scheme anymore. And with multi-button combinations and stuff making more things doable from the controller.
I do kind of wish Steam Input was a separate piece of software though, sort of like Xpadder back in the day. Some kind of open button-mapping standard with an API and everything.
The back paddles being only mappable to other controller buttons honestly drove my nuts