Can Valve do the same with their controller? Release a Windows driver so that I can use it with my emulators?

You may be able to use SC-Controller: https://github.com/C0rn3j/sc-controller

Note: the Windows support is a WIP and the devs don't have the new Steam Controller

You would just need to add your emulators as non-steam games in Steam. Then you get controller support.

But then I would have to install Steam, create an account, have it running in the background. And in case of macOS I would have to install Rosetta as well.

It would be better if they released drivers instead.

The Steam client is free and well-supported on all gaming OSes. It also provides Steam Input, which ensures customization parity with Steam Deck. In Valve's eyes, cross-platform support is already here.

A custom driver could always be made by the community. It feels a little absurd to expect Valve to write and support four different gamepad drivers, when they only need one.

> A custom driver could always be made by the community. It feels a little absurd to expect Valve to write and support four different gamepad drivers, when they only need one.

That is what the entire industry does though. Imagine if you needed an application running in the background for every peripheral you have, for your monitor, for your GPU, for running a hotspot on your smartphone over USB. Imagine having to install a piece of software to access a thumb drive. And that all those applications also needed user accounts. That is the entire point of having drivers.

For complex gamepads, the entire industry most certainly doesn't do that. It's not a class-compliant device, the preexisting OS-level mechanisms for Xinput and DirectInput do not accommodate anything but fight rudimentary fight sticks. The same goes for the original touchpad-based Steam Controller.

I don’t think steam needs Rosetta anymore.

Just checked. Still needs it. I don't have Rosetta installed and I don't want to install Rosetta just to be able to use a game controller with DuckStation or Aethersx2. When I can also connect a PS4 controller and not need any of that.

You have an old Steam.app stub, download the latest one and rosetta will not be necessary.

If you had rosetta it would be able to self-update to the new universal binary, without it you have to do this one update manually.

I downloaded from here and I instantly get a pop-up about requiring Rosetta.

https://store.steampowered.com/about/

Odd if true. It's clearly a universal binary, not sure what's going wrong for you.

$ file steam_osx

steam_osx: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]

steam_osx (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

steam_osx (for architecture arm64): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64

This appears to only be in the Steam beta - the version available for download still requires Rosetta. There doesn't seem to be a direct download for the beta - you have to opt into it after installing Steam.

Not the OP, but I just downloaded the latest stub from an M2 MacBook Air using Safari and it appears to be an x86_64-only binary:

  % file /Volumes/Steam/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx 
  /Volumes/Steam/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64]
  /Volumes/Steam/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

CMD+I on Steam.app says: "Application (Intel)".

% file steam_osx

steam_osx: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64]

steam_osx (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64