Valve released the first major firmware update for the Steam Controller Thursday, adding a litany of new features, including increased functionality outside of Steam, the company announced via their website. The update, according to Valve, responds to many concerns users have raised over the hardware since launching last month.
To make the Steam Controller more usable outside of gaming, the update adds extra options so players can set up a configurations to navigate their PC, including play/pause and volume control buttons. With the new Steam Client beta, which also launched Thursday, the controller gains compatibility for non-Steam games.
To facilitate co-op play, the Steam client beta also adds “configuration traveling,” which saves and transfers a controller’s settings when connecting to new devices, even when using a different Steam account.
Other features meant to enhance gaming seem focused on accommodating players who prefer using a mouse and keyboard to a controller. “Mouse-like joystick mode,” serves as a more PC-friendly alternative traditional joystick-based camera movement. The “Mouse region,” allows players to hotkey a certain section of the screen so they can, for example, easily switch between using a minimap and the main action. The controller now also features a system-level hotkey menu.
For FPS players, the update adds gyroscopic aiming, which allows players to combine the controllers mouse-like d-pad with physical movement to aim more accurately.
“Relying on the trackpad for large scale turns, and the gyro for fine tuning,” Valve wrote in the update, “community members found they were much more competitive than they were expecting.”
Separately, Valve released a video showing how Steam controllers are made. The company claims its automated assembly line in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, is one of the largest in the US.
“When we first started designing hardware at Valve, we decided we wanted to try and do the manufacturing as well,” Valve said in the release. “To achieve our goal of a flexible controller, we felt it was important to have a similar amount of flexibility in our manufacturing process, and that meant looking into automated assembly lines. It turns out that most consumer hardware of this kind still has humans involved in stages throughout manufacturing, but we kind of went overboard, and built one of the largest fully automated assembly lines in the US.”
If you watch closely, you can see that many of the machines feature the Aperture Science logo. The film crew didn’t get access to the test chambers, though. (Just kidding… I hope.)
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”