I turned my Steam Deck into a controller for my PC

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If you have a Steam Deck, then like me, you've probably started digging into the rest of your Steam library since you bought it. There are tons of great games on Steam that play well on the Steam Deck, but sometimes you want to play them on your PC too. If you don't have a controller for your PC but still want the controller experience on your PC, luckily you can use the Steam Deck as a controller, and it's pretty easy to do.



How I used Steam Remote Play to turn my Steam Deck into a controller

It's technically a workaround, but it's supported by Valve

If you want to use your Steam Deck as a controller, Valve specifically mentions this use case as possible in the Steam Deck FAQ. You can do this through Steam Remote Play, which streams games from a PC on the same network to the screen you're using, in this case the Steam Deck. To optimize the experience, however, you'll want to change the way Remote Play works a bit.

  1. Install the game you want to play on your PC and, if it's not a Steam game, make sure you add it to your library first.
  2. Connect the PC and your Steam Deck to the same network. For better performance, your PC can be connected via Ethernet instead of WiFi.
  3. Open Steam on your PC, click on the steam icon top left and select Settings.
    Screenshot of the Steam app with highlighted link to the settings menu

  4. Navigate to Remote playback Make sure that Remote playback is activated.
    Screenshot of the Steam app with the remote play menus

  5. Activate Advanced Host Optionsand then activate Play audio on the hostOtherwise, the audio will play on your Steam Deck instead.
    Screenshot of the Steam app with the “Play audio on host” option highlighted

  6. On your deck, find the game you want to stream in your library and select Electricity. If Play is what you see instead of Electricityclick on the arrow next to Play and select Stream from your PC.
    Screenshot of Steam Deck showing Baldur's Gate 3 with Remote Play button highlighted

  7. Choose your desktop Name of PC from the pop-up menu. The game will now launch on your PC and begin streaming to your Steam Deck.
    Selecting the Steam Remote Play game host machine.


If you want to try to reduce latency, if there is any, you can easily do so from your Steam Deck. Go to Settings, Remote playbackand activate Advanced streaming options. From there, you can lower the resolution and enable low latency mode. This will reduce the image quality of the game on your Steam Deck, but since you're only playing games on your PC and not looking at your Steam Deck, it doesn't matter. You also don't need a fast internet connection since it runs on the same network.


I have already used this to play Bread And Cyberpunk: 2077 on my PC and I'm looking forward to playing more games with it! It's obviously not as good as simply using a dedicated gaming controller on my PC, but it works surprisingly well. While there have been projects in the past like GlosSi that made it possible to emulate an Xbox 360 controller on your PC and connect your Steam Deck to it, the projects that were easy to use have all but died since then.

If you want a “real” controller experience instead, you can set up a VirtualHere USB server that simulates a controller through the Steam Deck. This is a very involved process that requires a bit of setup, but it works as if it were a native Steam Controller on your PC.

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