Live With It - The DTNS Product Review Show
Oct 14, 2026 · 27 min · 9 segments
Valve’s new $99 Steam Controller promises comfort, precision, and durability across PC, Steam, Android, and Mac games. But does it deliver? Core podcast host Scott Johnson joins us to share his…
Now, for those listening only, apologies, but I'm going to show off what is the Steam controller.
We'll get into maybe some of those reasons or maybe some of the things that this does better and kind of makes us forget about that old controller, but...
We're going to find out how this controller is for some of my game-related shows.
Now, okay, so when you said take a bullet for the team, what was your solution prior to this?
I'm not going to show this, but if you could see it over there, I have a bin, and there's probably, I don't know, 18 to 20 controllers in there.
And some of them are ones that people have shipped to me, like here's one right here.
I get lots of freebies in the mail or whatever, but then there have been some that I've hunted down for myself.
And I've got some legitimate Xbox Elite controllers in there that are designed to be sort of the best.
They used to make a lot of retro-looking controllers, but now they make some really great modern wireless and wired solution controllers for lots of things at very cheap prices.
And the reason this felt a little bit like biting a bullet is because this is a $99 piece of kit where most of these controllers I just mentioned are somewhere in the $29 to $65, let's say, dollar range range.
on average with good features with you know good technologies for the sticks and the analog and all that so there are plenty of good alternatives out there which made this even more interesting to talk about because we're no longer in the era of the mid 90s to early 2000s when Console controllers were made by the makers of the consoles, and they were the best ones to get.
If you went out and bought something like a Mad Catz controller or some other third-party controller, you were just about guaranteed it would be junk, not very good, and it would be the one you'd make your friend use when they come over to the house to play.
Now, for those listening only, apologies, but I'm going to show off what is the Steam controller.
We'll get into maybe some of those reasons or maybe some of the things that this does better and kind of makes us forget about that old controller, but...
We're going to find out how this controller is for some of my game-related shows.
Now, okay, so when you said take a bullet for the team, what was your solution prior to this?
I'm not going to show this, but if you could see it over there, I have a bin, and there's probably, I don't know, 18 to 20 controllers in there.
And some of them are ones that people have shipped to me, like here's one right here.
I get lots of freebies in the mail or whatever, but then there have been some that I've hunted down for myself.
And I've got some legitimate Xbox Elite controllers in there that are designed to be sort of the best.
They used to make a lot of retro-looking controllers, but now they make some really great modern wireless and wired solution controllers for lots of things at very cheap prices.
And the reason this felt a little bit like biting a bullet is because this is a $99 piece of kit where most of these controllers I just mentioned are somewhere in the $29 to $65, let's say, dollar range range.
on average with good features with you know good technologies for the sticks and the analog and all that so there are plenty of good alternatives out there which made this even more interesting to talk about because we're no longer in the era of the mid 90s to early 2000s when Console controllers were made by the makers of the consoles, and they were the best ones to get.
If you went out and bought something like a Mad Catz controller or some other third-party controller, you were just about guaranteed it would be junk, not very good, and it would be the one you'd make your friend use when they come over to the house to play.
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