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Controller Steam Input conflict

WARDOGS controller stops responding, or sensitivity spikes into aim drift

Published Data as of Season 1 · 10 Sept 2026

This one is on your machine

A hotfix enabled Steam Input for controllers without most players noticing, and it now conflicts with WARDOGS' own controller handling. Turning Steam Input off for WARDOGS in Steam has cleared both the dead-input and the over-sensitive variant for everyone who has reported back.

What you see

An Xbox controller that worked fine for days suddenly stops registering inputs correctly, or turning and aiming becomes far more sensitive than the in-game slider says — close to an aim drift. Both variants trace back to the same point: a hotfix that turned Steam Input on by default.

Also reported as: controller not registering · controller inputs not working · controller stopped working · controller aim drift · controller sensitivity · controller feels too sensitive · xbox controller sensitivity · extreme sensitivity controller

Fixes, in the order worth trying

Work top to bottom and stop when the game launches. Each step is labelled with how much evidence sits behind it, so you can skip the guesses if the first ones work.

  1. 01 Turn off Steam Input for WARDOGS

    Reported

    In your Steam library, right-click WARDOGS → Properties → Controller, and set the controller override to Disabled (the same toggle is reachable from the controller icon on the game's Steam page). Two players on Steam Discussions confirmed this cleared a dead-input fault after a hotfix quietly turned Steam Input on; a WARDOGS Hub reader separately confirmed the same setting fixed an aim-drift and over-sensitivity variant on an Xbox controller.

  2. 02 Reconnect the controller after disabling it

    Reported

    Both reports that confirmed the fix did a full controller reconnect rather than switching the setting mid-session — unplug and replug, or restart WARDOGS, before judging whether it worked.

Did this fix it for you?

Notes from other players who hit this code. Say what worked, what did not, and which region you are in — a fix that only works in one place is worth knowing about. Best-rated first, and there is no time limit: an answer from the first beta is still an answer.

No comments yet. Be the first to say whether this worked.

Two different symptoms, one cause. Some players lose controller input entirely — the pad "does nothing in game" after working fine the day before. Others keep input but lose control of it: turning and aiming become dramatically more sensitive than the slider says, close enough to an involuntary aim drift that it feels like a hardware fault. Both started showing up around the same point, and the common thread in every report is Steam Input.

What players traced it to

On Steam Discussions, Night__Ninja reported a wired Xbox Elite controller that had worked the day before suddenly stopped registering input correctly — not a disconnect, just dead. Restarting the game, the system and the controller didn't touch it. The fix: "I disabled steam input which solved the issue must have been hotfix they dropped that enabled it." Another player, Kree, confirmed the same fix worked for them.

That is the dead-input variant. A WARDOGS Hub reader described the other one: sensitivity that felt "almost like an unintended aim drift" even with in-game sensitivity set low, arriving suddenly after days of the same controller working normally. Disabling Steam Input fixed that too. Neither report found anything wrong in WARDOGS' own settings menu — the conflict sits between Steam's controller layer and the game's, not in a slider you can see.

Not the mouse issue

This is a controller-only fault. If your input device is a mouse and aiming feels heavy or decelerated rather than twitchy or dead, that's a different, confirmed bug — see WARDOGS mouse feels sluggish, which is V-Sync, not Steam Input.

What Bulkhead has said

Nothing yet. No Steam post credits or denies a hotfix change to Steam Input defaults, and neither Discussions thread has a developer reply. Treat "a hotfix enabled it" as the players' own diagnosis, not a confirmed changelog line — it's reported here because two independent reports on the dead-input side agree on it, and because disabling Steam Input is a cheap, reversible thing to try either way.

Source

WARDOGS Steam Discussions, "controller inputs not registering correctly" ↗

If that did not do it