Nearing 1M sold, Valve plans to boost promotion of Steam Controller games

At Steam Dev Days in Seattle this afternoon, Valve’s Jeff Bellinghausen revealed strong sales for the company’s unique Steam Controller, and potential perks for developers who support it.

"We announced in June that we had sold 500,000 controllers,” he said, “and we’re now on track to sell a million by early next year.” The controller originally launched in November 2015.

The controller is one of the hinges of Valve’s strategy to make PC games more living room-friendly, putting the 125 million-user Steam platform in the same physical space as PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo.

Valve has been selling the controller individually and in bundles alongside games and the Steam Link streaming device on the Steam storefront, to help drive sales. Bellinghausen said the controller has 27,000 daily active players, with nearly an hour average play session with the controller.

Valve is also looking at ways to improve discoverability of games that work well with the Steam Controller.

"Now that there is a significant installed base of controller users we are working on ways to promote games that they may be interested in," he said. "One of the more direct methods is to present customers with a 'most popular with Steam Controller' games list. Titles on this list will be easily discoverable for both new purchasers as well as existing customers. We will also continue to run focused sales that highlight hand-picked controller-friendly titles."

In other words, better support for the Steam Controller for your game, the better the discoverability for your game (potentially).

While players can configure the Steam Controller to work with almost every game, and share those configurations with one another, developers also have the option to offer "official" configurations.

Check out the full talk writeup here, and accompanying graphs below: