Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won’t be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library.
The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) is important to Valve’s Steam runtime and used by many games for cross-platform hardware/software abstractions. In ensuring good support ahead of the new Steam Controller’s retail availability and seeing that it makes it into the next SDL3 update, today that new Steam Controller support is already upstreamed to SDL Git.
Valve uses SDL for their own games, so this stuff would have been worked on internally and developed alongside the hardware itself.
But that’s the benefit of open source in the end, when done well everybody wins. Valve gets to ensure that any game using SDL can function perfectly with their hardware (Deck, Controller and Frame), any devs using SDL in their games knows they get first-party hardware support, and gamers get the benefit of both.