Valve shares data on Steam's most popular game/controller pairings

Over the weekend, Valve published a blog detailing the top controller-friendly games on Steam for 2018, and the analysis includes guides to help players find games they might enjoy most with the kind of controller they own. 

These guides could be useful for developers interested in seeing what genre of game was most compatible for different controllers, including the PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch Pro, and Steam controllers. 

For every controller, each guide is broken down into three sections: most popular, most unique, and local multiplayer.

Each section starts off by highlighting the 50 games most popular with that controller, with Valve looking at the number of minutes played in each game with each type of controller.

After doing some more math, Valve generated a list of generally popular games that also have good controller support for each kind of controller.

Interestingly enough, many of the most popular games show up as played a lot with all four controller types.

The most unique games by controller provides some pretty interesting info in regards to what types of games players gravitated to the most. For example, PlayStation controllers were the choice for fighting games, with Soulcalibur 6, BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle and Street Fighter 5 making the list. 

Xbox controller owners seemed to prefer open-world games, with titles like Just Cause 3, Saints Row 4, Skyrim and Mafia 3 among the list of games that are most unique to the device. 

As explained in the blog, Valve speculates that these preferences point to both a difference in demographics between owners of the respective controllers, and a differing level of support for specific controllers between games.

Interested developers can check out the lists here.