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The story
A thread on 5ch’s Hardware & Industry board features a post from a Switch-and-PC gamer who bought a PS5 “DualSense” controller just to use with Steam. The focus of the discussion: the age-old headache of confirm-button placement, where Nintendo Switch controllers put “confirm” on B, while Xbox, PS5, and other XInput-style controllers put it on A or Cross (✕). Some posters pointed out that “you can remap ABXY in Steam’s settings,” while others countered that “in some games, the on-screen button prompts still don’t change” — sparking a debate over just how much Steam Input can actually fix.
What people said
The worst is in action games where you need to instantly counter with X, and you have to figure out whether it means 'the physical position of the real X button (which is Y on this pad)' or 'press whatever's labeled X on this controller' — it gets so confusing.
PS5's symbol buttons (○✕△□) have nothing to do with letters, so you just memorize button position + symbol and press exactly what's shown. Way more comfortable.
If you've been playing on a Nintendo controller for years, it's hard to adjust when someone says 'press B!' and you're stuck with this cursed controller that has A and B swapped.
Just change the button config, that's all you need to do.
Then what's even the point of using Steam?
[Granblue Fantasy:] Relink didn't have Switch-controller icons in-game until the Switch version came out, so even if the remap worked, you'd still have to mentally flip it like OP does — unusable.
Steam lets you switch the controller profile between PS5, Xbox, and Switch in settings — have you even played it, or are you just talking? ("air-playing," 5ch slang for bluffing without hands-on experience)
I don't play such a super-niche game, so it's not an issue for me.
That's exactly my point — if you can ignore the ABXY labels printed on the controller,
then there's a feature that remaps the ABXY positions to match a Nintendo controller, right?
That doesn't change the move-list icons shown on screen, though.
Are you sure you've actually played Relink?
No, you're the one who hasn't actually played it.
A lawsuit over wear-and-tear degradation on the PS5 DualSense determined its lifespan to be 417 hours (rewritten article)
https://gamecolumn.jp/blog-entry-78125.html
Lol, court documents confirming it's garbage.
At this rate Sony's going bankrupt lol
The Xbox 360 version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Gekka no Yasoukyoku), and the officially Japanese-localized Life Is Strange on Steam.
Ah, I see — you mean the skills mapped to RB + a face button are shown by their up/down/left/right position, so they end up mismatched?
If that's the issue, Steam has a setting for that too.
I think it's called "Button Guide Code" — a feature that only remaps the buttons while a specific button is held down,
so you can make it so the ABXY layout reverts back to normal while RB is held.
and on top of that, most games let you remap buttons again in their own settings — so you can customize most of it.
It's not like you can remap just the confirm button on its own, right?
All you're doing is remapping buttons in general.
It's on Sony for never putting in the effort to popularize a format like XInput — that's exactly why some games don't support DualSense or its UI at all.
And now that they've pulled out of PC multiplatform releases, it'll only get worse. Plus it's got a battery crammed in, making it needlessly heavy.
Sure, but a controller that only works with XInput is trash in its own way.
It also makes it useless with a Switch controller.
Its price is the only 'premium' thing about it — the drift-prone stick isn't durable, and I don't see anything to it besides paying tribute to Sony.
It's not the cursed controller with backwards ABXY.
Basically, when a game shows ABXY prompts like that bottom-right corner and doesn't support Nintendo-style mapping, it's a pain.
Sometimes there's nothing the Steam client or controller settings can do about it.
PS5 and Steam really don't play well together even on the controller front.
There's no way ○✕△□ buttons were ever going to catch on for PC.
Switch at least uses the same ABXY as PC.
The positions are reversed, so that's actually worse.
It's the exact opposite.
Steam's default is also confirm-on-bottom-button, so a PS controller works as-is and the on-screen prompts change correctly in most games.
With a Switch controller, the position flips and causes confusion.
That's exactly what OP (Re: #1) was talking about.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The position of the “confirm” button on a gamepad has a different history depending on the manufacturer. Under the XInput standard used by Xbox and PS5, A (bottom) or Cross/✕ (bottom) became the standard confirm button, but Nintendo has kept B (bottom) as confirm even on Switch — and this discrepancy has confused PC gamers for years. Steam does have settings that let you change how ABXY looks and is mapped for each controller, but as posters in the thread pointed out, if a game itself isn’t built to automatically switch its on-screen button prompts based on the physical controller type, the displayed prompts and the actual inputs can stay mismatched even after changing the settings. Differing understanding of exactly where the technical line falls — how much Steam’s settings can actually paper over — is what drove the disagreement in the thread.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware & Industry (Geha)) thread “I’m a Switch/PC Gamer Who Bought a PS5 Controller to Play on Steam.”
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