During the announcement of Steam Controller Valve claimed that it is good enough for playing games only supporting keyboard and mouse. While the claim sounds intriguing, only few people had the chance to try it at Valve HQ. While the rest of us will have to wait a while before feeling how well SC works, the video demonstration can be a weaker, but still decent proof of concept.

A hardware engineer from Valve has posted the first video showing gameplay using remapped keyboard and mouse controls on the new input device. In the video we see both the game and the controller being used to play some games. The games shown were Portal 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Civilization V and Papers, Please. While those two Valve's games have native X360 gamepad support, Steam Controller was used to emulate m&k controls in all cases. Judging by the video Portal 2 and CS: GO seem to control much better on SC than on X360 gamepad where many quick and precise aiming moves were shown. The Civilization V also seemed easy to control, although direct 1:1 mapping between mouse and trackpad controls required lifting a finger and moving it to the opposite side a lot. Finally in Papers, Please, SC was configured to use both trackpads as a mouse, to allow for faster cursor movement when needed.

Overall, this first demonstration shows Steam Controller as a very promising device, covering some game genres, which played badly on traditional gamepads. There will be more demonstrations in the future and Valve will show gameplay from games from players' comments.