Top Controller-Friendly Games of 2018
Yesterday we revealed the top-selling and top-played games of 2018 across all of Steam. In building those year-end lists, we also became curious as to which games were most popular with different kinds of controllers. We know from past analysis, that a lot of players on Steam have used a controller of some kind to play a game (36.7 Million players at last count). And we know that not every game works equally as well with each model of controller, so we wanted to put together some guides to help find the games that you might enjoy most with the particular kind of controller that you have.
With that in mind, we’ve put together a set of pages to highlight the most popular games being played with each of the most common controller models: Top Games played with Xbox controllers (including a huge range of 3rd party controllers that are very similar), Top games played with PlayStation controllers, Top games played with Steam Controllers, and finally Top Games Played With Nintendo Switch Pro controllers.
Each page is broken down into three sections:
Each page starts off highlighting the 50 games most popular with that controller. To build this list, we looked at the number of minutes played in each game with each type of controller. We divided that by the number of days that game was available in 2018 so as to avoid under-counting the popularity of games released in the middle or later half of 2018. What we ended up with was a list of generally popular games that also have really good controller support for each kind of controller. If you are looking for a popular game to play with a controller, these are going to be a great place to start.
We found it interesting that many of the most popular games show up as played a lot with all four controller types. This is great and means that those games have excellent support built in for most controllers.
The next thing we wanted to know was what particular games had bigger audiences using one controller type versus another controller type. This would indicate that either the game didn’t support all controllers equally, or that the game was somehow of greater interest to the demographic of players that own a particular type of controller.
So we looked for the set of games that were most uniquely popular among players with one controller type, and came up with a list of the top 15 titles for each.
Finally, we thought it would be interesting to highlight the games that we see being played with more than one controller at a time, demonstrating that the game is popular as a local multiplayer game. If you have a couple of controllers and are looking for some split-screen or shared-screen games to play with a friend, these are some rock-solid choices.
- Xbox Controller Friendly – https://store.steampowered.com/sale/xbox_controller_friendly/
- PS Controller Friendly – https://store.steampowered.com/sale/ps_controller_friendly/
- Steam Controller Friendly – https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steam_controller_friendly/
- Switch Pro Controller Friendly – https://store.steampowered.com/sale/switch_controller_friendly/
Cheers,
-The Steam Team
PS: If you happen to be one of the roughly 700 people that have figured out how to plug dance pads into your PC and are looking for something to play, our analysis shows that you should probably just play Crypt of the NecroDancer or The Metronomicon.
