Play non-steam games with a steam controller on pc
If you’ve been playing games on pc, you’re more than likely cultivating most of your digital library through steam. Valve’s storefront has been the de‑facto place to purchase and play pc games for decades, even as publishers like microsoft, epic, blizzard, and more are attempting to lure players away with their own storefronts. Some offer great incentives to do so. Microsoft offers its game pass titles exclusively through the xbox app on windows, while epic gives away games weekly that you can only redeem through its own launcher.
This segmentation can make it unnecessarily complicated to keep all of your games in one place or, at least, available through a single launcher for easy living‑room play. It’s also problematic with controllers, especially if you’re accustomed to heavily customizing your controller input schemes with steam input. This input layer only functions through steam, and is part of the reason why valve’s new steam controller doesn’t work outside of the platform. So if you’re looking to unify where all your games launch from and benefit from all the work valve has put into steam, here’s how to get everything working through steam regardless of where you purchased your games.
How to add non‑steam executables to steam and unlock the controller
You can play non‑steam games with a steam controller on pc by adding standard windows executables to your library. The process is straightforward: open steam, go to the games tab in settings bar at the top, click add a non‑steam game to my library, then browse folders across your pc for these .exe files.
- find default directories if you haven’t edited them
- select each executable and add it to your library
- launch from steam to get steam input overlay
Key benefit: the controller works seamlessly with any game that uses steam input, even those bought elsewhere.
UWP hook for xbox games pass titles
If you’re a subscriber to xbox games pass or purchase games through the xbox app on pc, those are not standard executables but universal windows platform (uwp) apps that steam doesn’t natively recognize. The solution is uwphook, a free open‑sourced tool that creates links for these uwp games in steam. Once linked, you can play non‑steam games with a steam controller on pc through the wrapper that includes steam input and big picture mode.
- download uwphook from its website
- scan your pc for uwp titles
- choose which to add and rename them
- they appear in steam library ready to play
uwphook has been a tried‑tested method for years, though you may need to test each favorite to confirm input works.
Whether you just want to get your latest steam controller working with all your pc games, or you want everything in your digital library integrated into one launcher, it doesn’t take much effort anymore to play non‑steam games with a steam controller on pc.