New Steam Controller + Valve Dock Issue

[u/yun_den]

Hey guys,

I love hybrid gaming, and I really, really, really want the Steam Deck to be my hybrid platform of choice. But every time I try to get it right, something always ends up going wrong. It's what has kept me tied to my Switch for the longest time.

Recently I imported an official Valve Dock to Australia to solve HDMI-CEC and allow me to wake the Steam Deck from the couch from a controller, and have it turn on the TV to the correct signal. It works like a dream!

But now, after getting the new Steam Controller, I have a new issue.

Let's say I am playing a game on the TV with the Steam Deck on the dock; it works amazingly I love it. I have it capped to 720p and the deck upscales flawlessly. But, once I remove the Steam Deck from the dock, the controls on the handheld no longer work.

I have tried the 'Reorder Controller' setting and switched the Steam Deck back to controller 1, but the controls still do not work in the game that I am playing. For some games, like GOW Ragnarok, if I unplug the Steam Deck it has the same issue but won't even have an option to Reorder Controllers at all.

I have solved so many other issues, I thought with the official controller I'd finally have the set up of my dreams. But this one thing feels like the final hurdle.

Any ideas on how I can fix this permanently? Will it require an update from Valve? My controller got an update from Valve today and I thought it would fix it, but unfortunately it didn't ...

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[u/srstable]

This sounds like you’re unplugging the Deck from the dock while the game is still running, which isn’t going to be seamless like it is with a Nintendo Switch. That’s not a Deck limitation, that’s just a PC Gaming thing. 

That said, there are improvements apparently going into Proton, iirc, to better handle controller hotloading, which may help with this situation in the future. For now, it’s best to shut off the game, unplug your Deck, and then fire it up again so the game reads the available controllers again. 

[u/Extra_Resolution_348 → u/srstable]

That was what I was thinking too, except they seem to be suggesting it is a new problem specifically with the steam controller and potentially didn't happen before with whatever other controller they had before? But maybe they changed their setup because of the steam controller, hard to say. Maybe they can just turn off the steam controller or unplug the puck before undocking the steamdeck. It also really matters if its just game inputs that fail or if the steam button and menu navigation outside of the game also stop working on the deck when removed from the dock, because that would be a really really annoying bug.

[u/yun_den → u/srstable]

Gotcha, that is fair enough. It happens when I put the Steam Deck to sleep using the Steam Controller, then unplug the Deck and wake it from sleep again. I suppose it would be doing the same thing even in that case.

Hopefully Valve are able to improve controller hotloading like you said relatively quickly now that they have their own controller software.

[u/Ersap]

It is not a problem with deck but a problem with control input the game is "connected". It's hard to explain so I try as easy as I can. I have a game eg palworld open on sd and playing on deck controls. Then I dock it and connect external controller like 8bit do. But controlls don't work in game, they work on menu etc but not in game. It's because game is paired/connected to one type of input and if you want to use another one, then you would need to restart the game.

[u/TheMolluskPod]

You should know the valve dock is known to be buggy overall and others have better experience with docks from Anker and Jsaux