Valve announces Hori wireless Steam controller for Japanese market

Valve announces the Horipad controller in collaboration with Hori. The official Steam controller is currently only available in Japan for a recommended retail price of around 46 euros. It is not clear whether the companies will also offer such a gamepad in other markets.

The Horipad has a button layout that largely mirrors that of Xbox controllers. In addition to the usual joysticks, buttons and triggers, the game controller has two additional menu buttons in the middle and four programmable buttons. These buttons are located in pairs on the bottom and back of the controller respectively. Users can connect the device to a PC or Steam Deck via Bluetooth or with a USB-C cable.

The company says that in collaboration with Hori, the controller has ensured that the controller works well with the Steam Input API. The gaming platform supports more than 300 controllers, but the Horipad is currently the only one officially developed in collaboration with Valve. Between 2013 and 2019, Valve sold its own so-called Steam Controller, which, unlike most controllers, only had one joystick and two trackpads next to it.

Valve announces the gamepad in a blog post about controller use on Steam. According to the company, average controller usage on the platform has tripled since 2018, from 5 percent then to 15 percent now. The vast majority of users who use a controller, namely about 59 percent of that group, use an Xbox controller. 10 percent of gamepad users play on the Steam Deck and 26 percent use a PlayStation controller.