In this guide, you’ll learn how to connect your Nintendo Switch joy-cons both of them left and right with Steam to get them to function as a single game controller instead of two individual controllers.
The first thing you will need to do is get them connected to your PC. On the back of them where they plug into your switch, you’ll find a big circular button in the middle, you just need to hold it for a couple of seconds until the lights on the back of it start to flash. Do this for both joy and cons.
Then inside of your computer’s Bluetooth settings, just select add Bluetooth or other devices.
At the top click on Bluetooth, you will find joy con left or joy con right detecting both of them. So first select one and then do the same for the other joy con.
It’s worth noting that sometimes these lights won’t stop blinking even when they’re properly paired with your computer. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just Nintendo stuff that doesn’t always like talking to non-Nintendo stuff.
The next thing you need to do is open up Steam and activate the Steam beta. You can go to settings and then to the account, you’ll find a beta participation section.
You can click on the change button to either select use the steam beta update.
Inside of your steam settings down inside of your game controller settings, you have to open up general controller settings.
After that, enable whatever kind of controllers you are using which could be PlayStation controller support or switch configuration support which is what you want. Then each one of these joy-cons is being treated as its controller which you don’t want.Â
You want to use this button here that says use Nintendo button layout and combine the pairs of joy-con controllers into a single controller.
So these two will be paired with your computer and are now considered a singular pair of controllers and then you can check the preferences. You can name it whatever you want.
You can change the player slot led and all that. You can also mess around with calibration controls.
If you find you’re experiencing stick drift which a lot of joy-con controllers do experience a fair bit. You can tweak the dead zones inside of this setting here as well.
Then you can go back and be ready to take your two joy-con controllers and go to the races and start playing games on Steam. It doesn’t require any extra drivers or anything however if you want to get these working onto a different game that isn’t steam-powered or based around the steam launcher you may need to use something like better joy combined with a program like ds4windows.