Controller use on Steam has 'more than doubled' since 2018

A recent update on Steam's DualSense controller support offers a couple of interesting tidbits on how more and more Steam users are using good ol' fashioned gamepads when playing games through Steam.

According to the team at Steam, the number of daily active users playing a Steam game with a controller has more than doubled over the last two years.

For PlayStation controllers specifically, Steam says that 21.6 percent of all controller sessions are folks using a DualShock (or, recently, a DualSense) controller, up from only 10.9 percent two years back.

As another standalone example, the blog offers up that 90 percent of all players in skateboarding games opt for a controller rather than mouse and keyboard.

Steam doesn't offer up exact numbers with any of this data unfortunately (and controller use isn't one of the things tracked in Steam's regular hardware survey results). For what it's worth the blog post notes that the number is at least in the millions, though that's not saying a ton given that Steam's concurrent user count for the last 48 hours hasn't dipped below 14 million.