Every game added to your steam deck’s steam library (whether it is an official steam game or simply a shortcut to a game you installed some other way and are just linking to steam (right click on game or application in desktop mode and click “add to steam”)) has a set of controller profiles associated with it. Your steam deck starts off with some basic templates for steam deck onboard control schemes like Gamepad Layout or WASD and Mouse Layout that map the onboard steam deck controls to what most defaults are for that type of software or game.

You can search for community layouts very easily in the steam deck’s controller menu, and you can go into the settings and start changing things by simply opening up the controller layout menu and clicking edit layout. You have control over all of the buttons and inputs on the steam deck and there is a simple menu system that allows you to walk through settings for everything on your deck (buttons, joysticks, touchpads, triggers etc…).

It might seem overwhelming at first, but the good thing is that manyyyyy popular games already have controller mappings that a steam deck user in the community uploaded to steam. Just go into the community layouts tab and browse a couple steam deck layouts, try them out quick and pick the one that feels most intuitive to you and then just go. Later down the road you can get your hands dirty and tweak the little things if you want (and I promise it really isn’t that overwhelming).

The starting controller layout templates can’t be deleted/written over, so you don’t need to worry about messing anything up either, you can always just start again from the very decent templates and defaults.