Dish: the free Steam Controller replacement we've been waiting for

The Steam Controller has a cult following, and not by accident. When Valve launched it in 2015 it was the only PC gamepad on the market that took remote PC gaming seriously: dual trackpads instead of a right stick, deep per-game customization, gyro aim, full key-and-mouse mapping. For a generation of PC gamers, it was the controller you used for the games other controllers couldn’t handle.

Then Valve discontinued it in November 2019. They shipped about 1.6 million units total. Six years later, the second-hand market is brutal. Refurbished units routinely sell for $150 to $250 USD, more than they cost new, and there is no first-party replacement. The Steam Deck inherited the trackpad DNA, but you can’t pop the Deck’s trackpad off and use it as a standalone wireless controller for your gaming PC.

This is the gap Dish was built into. If what you loved about the Steam Controller was the way it let your PC games come to wherever you were sitting, Dish does the same job. Better in some dimensions, worse in others, and free.

This article is an honest comparison.

The headline numbers

The latency comparison is the one that genuinely surprises people. The Steam Controller’s proprietary 2.4 GHz radio is good, but it still has to sit in a polling slot every ~4 ms and decode through Steam Input. Dish takes the same 250 Hz sample rate and pipes it through a single Wi-Fi UDP packet. Typically 1 to 4 ms of network latency on a modern 5 GHz link, which means it usually beats the Steam Controller’s wired mode end-to-end.

Where Dish straight-up wins

1. It exists.

This is the unsexy advantage. The Steam Controller has been out of production for over six years. New users can’t buy one without paying scalper prices and accepting that there’s no warranty, no replacement parts, no firmware updates. Dish is software. You install it on your phone or laptop and on your gaming PC, and you have a full controller in five minutes.

2. Latency, in practice

A modern 5 GHz Wi-Fi link delivers a small (50-byte) packet to the access point in 1 to 3 ms. Dish ships the input as a 12-byte UDP datagram with DSCP EF (expedited forwarding) marking, so QoS-aware routers prioritize it ahead of bulk traffic. End-to-end finger-to-game-state latency on a healthy 5 GHz network is typically 6 to 9 ms.

The Steam Controller’s wireless mode has been measured around 10 to 15 ms in independent reviews. Wired USB mode brings it to roughly 4 to 6 ms. Dish is in the same neighborhood as the wired Steam Controller, over the air.

(See our latency deep-dive for the full budget.)

3. Encryption and privacy

The Steam Controller’s wireless protocol is a closed Valve-internal thing. There is no public documentation of how the link is authenticated, and as far as anyone has been able to determine, there’s no symmetric encryption on the inputs themselves. On a shared Wi-Fi (a coffee shop, a dorm, a friend’s house), a sufficiently motivated attacker on the same LAN could observe, possibly inject, input packets if they cared to.

Dish’s wire format is documented and uses ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD on every packet, with a per-session key derived from a PIN-based handshake. Replays are blocked by a sliding nonce window. The security page walks the threat model in detail.

Plus: zero telemetry. Steam logs how long you use your Steam Controller and which games you play with it. Dish logs nothing. There’s no account, there’s no cloud, there’s nothing on a server because there’s no server.

4. Range

A Steam Controller’s USB dongle reaches one drywall wall before reception starts to wobble. With Dish, your range is your Wi-Fi’s range, and modern mesh networks cover an entire house easily. We’ve gotten Dish to work cleanly in a friend’s two-story house with the gaming PC on the second floor and the player in a basement room.

5. It’s free, and the source is online

Dish is LGPL-3.0. Every line is on GitHub. If you want the full transparency that comes with open source, for security, for trust, or just to fork it and add your own button mapping, it’s there.

If Dish makes your gaming setup better, donations keep the lights on. There is no required spend.

Where the Steam Controller is still better

I’m going to be honest, because comparison articles that pretend their product wins on every axis are exhausting:

1. Trackpads are unique

The Steam Controller’s two capacitive trackpads were genuinely revolutionary. They let you play mouse-driven games (RTS, MMOs, even point-and-click adventures) on a controller in a way that no thumbstick controller ever has. Dish ships a configurable touch overlay on Android, but a flat phone screen is not the same haptic experience as a textured concave trackpad. If you specifically need trackpad input for an RTS, the Steam Controller still wins.

(Counterpoint: most people who use Dish on a phone are playing twin-stick games where a touch overlay is fine, or they’re using Dish as a relay for a real Bluetooth gamepad already paired to their phone.)

2. Haptics

Valve’s HD haptics in the Steam Controller (and now in the Steam Deck) are best-in-class. Phone vibration motors are coarser. If precise haptic feedback matters to you, this is a real Steam Controller advantage.

3. Steam Input integration

Steam Input has a deep, deep customization system: chord bindings, action sets, per-game profiles synced via the cloud, and active community-shared configurations for almost every game. Dish has per-app overlay layouts but doesn’t integrate with Steam Input at the same depth. (You can still use the on-screen keyboard, mouse mapping, etc., through Satellite’s virtual gamepad, but the Steam Input UX is its own ecosystem.)

4. Battery as a controller, not a phone

A Steam Controller runs on two AAs and lasts ~80 hours. Your phone, used as a Dish controller, runs the screen the whole time. Realistically you’ll plug it in for a long session. (We measure ~0.5 to 1% battery per hour with the screen on at minimum brightness during a Dish session. Your phone will outlast a typical gaming evening, but not a road trip.)

Who should switch

You should consider Dish as your Steam Controller replacement if:

• You’re tired of paying scalper prices on the second-hand market.
• Your Steam Controller is starting to wear (sticky right trackpad, drifting analog stick, dying batteries) and you need something soon.
• You play across the house, not at a desk.
• You want couch co-op without buying three more controllers.
• You care about privacy and have a default-no policy on telemetry.

You should keep your Steam Controller if:

• You play a lot of trackpad-heavy games and have learned the muscle memory for them.
• You’re deep into the Steam Input community and have heavily customized configurations you don’t want to rebuild.
• You game alone at a desk and don’t need the wireless-across-the-house range.

How to switch (the 5-minute version)

1. Install Dish for Android on the phone or tablet you want to use as the controller. (downloads) (Dish for Windows, macOS, and Linux are in development for a later release.)
2. Install Satellite for Windows on your gaming PC. (releases)
3. Open Dish; it auto-discovers your gaming PC over mDNS. Tap it, type the 4-digit PIN that pops up on Satellite. Done.
4. Press a button. Your game responds.

That’s the entire process. Same Wi-Fi, no router config, no port forwarding, no Steam account.

What to read next

• The full how-it-works walkthrough
• The latency deep-dive, exactly where the milliseconds go
• Why Wi-Fi UDP beats Bluetooth for gamepad streaming
• PC gamepads compared: 15 wireless controllers and virtual gamepad apps, ranked by latency

If Dish made your “what do I do now that the Steam Controller is dead?” problem actually solvable, donations keep the project going. We don’t make money from this. We just want it to keep existing.

Methodology

The Dish numbers in this article were measured / estimated as follows:

• Polling rate: 250 Hz on Android (XInput-equivalent samples), matched to wired Xbox controller behavior.
• Latency: measured on a TP-Link Wi-Fi 6E mesh, gaming PC on Ethernet, phone on 5 GHz, both within 5 m of the AP. Low-percentile finger-to-render-state latency is typically 6 to 9 ms; jitter under 2 ms.
• Encryption: ChaCha20-Poly1305 IETF (libsodium on the server, CryptoKit / Bouncy Castle on the client), 12-byte nonce = 4-byte session ID + 8-byte monotonic counter.
• Multi-controller: ViGEmBus on Windows supports up to 8 virtual Xbox 360 pads; Satellite caps at 4 to keep the latency budget tight.

Steam Controller numbers are widely-cited from Valve’s documentation and independent reviews. Resale prices reflect Q1 2026 eBay completed-listings averages.

Numbers should be re-verified against your specific hardware before being quoted authoritatively.

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