It is a pretty excellent controller. It's kind of amazing how many keyboard/mouse only games you can comfortably with a little tweaking of the keybindings.

I haven't tried using it directly with my computer, just for couch gaming with my TV and Steam Link. The Steam Link is also pretty cool, but has some serious issues with crashing Steam on my PC - not sure whether it is the Link itself, or Big Picture mode, but it is super irritating to have to get up and go restart Steam in the other room when it craps out in the middle of a game. The Wake-On-LAN feature has never worked for me...

Its hard to convince people of the utility though. It also has a pretty large ramp-up time.

A friend of mine keeps trying mine out on stuff like cities skylines and determining it's no good. Its somewhat unsurprising, skylines is a very work-table feeling game; replacing a mouse would feel really weird (and take a while to really feel decent).

For me it clicked demoing DOOM mods; it felt great on the controller and I could throw it up on my TV.

Stardew Valley feels pretty good too and while you can play RTS games with it (control groups on the left pad), it won't compare with a mouse anytime soon.

I wanted to return mine. It was the worst controller I've ever used.

I stuck with it after hearing about other people having similar experiences and changing their minds and now I can't go back to using an Xbox controller.

Stardew Valley might not the best example as it was designed to work also with a gamepad. You control the mouse cursor with the right analog stick and the player with the left stick.

Ah, well. I've been playing a lot of it lately. Its the same with the steam controller except the touchpad is a really nice mouse.

The steam controller probably should still work well in scenerioes where a controller is intended. Admittedly, I don't think it's as good for third person games.

I pre-ordered it months before release but have been rather frustrated with being able to use it for anything replacing a right analog stick. It's been barely okay for turn based games like civilization but for something like bioshock infinite it feels woefully inaccurate and difficult to get the feel, even after 2 weeks of solid use (including scores of steam link crashes)

If you're using GNU/Linux, it could be a problem with the nvidia drivers. Mine constantly crashed due to a bug with nvidia-358, updating to 361 fixed it and now I don't think its crashed since.

The sounds that play when starting and turning off the controller are emitted by the haptic engines in the pads! It's pretty crazy they have so much control over feedback they can reproduce music.

I bought mine on a lark to play with Street Fighter V, and it's surprisingly good for that use case.

None of my fight pads were XInput and I was a little lazy about setting up an XInput wrapper to get them to work.

The left touch d-pad is quite good for quarter and half circle motions, and dragon punches are pretty easy to pull off.

I also experimented with the right pad as buttons. It was pretty good, but where it fell short is that the right pad, unlike the left pad, doesn't offer any tactile cues as to where your fingers are.

Indeed, I don't think it's going to be a replacement for serious competitive gaming e.g. dedicated arcade sticks for Street Fighter (though I'm very intrigued at the people trying to use a combination of the touchpad and the accelerometer for rapid accurate aiming in FPS games), but for casual gaming it could comfortably work with 95% of the games out there, even in command-heavy games like Civ and XCOM.

There are definitely better options for serious competitive gamers. I have a small collection of arcade sticks and six-button fight pads, but I like messing around with new stuff too.

I can't say that I was any better using the Steam controller (not that I'm any good to start with, but that's another story), but the real story I guess is that I wasn't much worse either.

I've seen some demos where people used the accelerometer to play Street Fighter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0YGzURzThY) which could open up the game to some people with physical limitations. I'm a fan of anything that gets more people into playing games.

That the Steam Controller is more customizable than a lot of controllers to me is its biggest strength. And now, with the ability to 3d print mods, I think it's even better.

It works fine for stuff like Civ and XCOM. Part of it is the experience though. XCOM is pretty easy to watch and doesn't have many complicated menus (there are menues, but they aren't too bad). It's probably a good fit! Civ is similar.

Cities Skylines has tons of menus, sliders, charts, tiny checkboxes, small details to attend to and is generally uninteresting for onlookers most of the time. Even if you're just being creative without all the micromanaging, a controller still feels more like an inferior tool that stands in the way of your designs. It's just not comfortable to sit back, relax and build the perfect city. That game is much better suited to play alone at your desk with a mouse and keyboard.

Edit: sorry wrong person, but it still works as a response, so I'm leaving it. I've been awake too long.

Can you use it with non-Steam games?

Yes, but Steam may need to be running

That sucks then.