What causes Remote Play Together guests having no controller input?

Remote Play Together streams the host's screen and injects each guest as a virtual Steam Input controller, so a game reading raw OS gamepad APIs never sees the guests' devices.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Remote Play Together Guests Having No Controller Input

Quick answer: Read all player input through Steam Input so virtual guest controllers appear as real ones, assign each connected controller to a player slot, and handle controllers connecting mid-session.

If only the host can play during Remote Play Together, your game is reading raw device input that the guests' virtual controllers do not appear in. Steam injects them only through Steam Input.

How to fix it

1. Read input via Steam Input

Enumerate controllers with SteamInput()->GetConnectedControllers and read actions through Steam Input. Guest virtual pads only show up there, not in raw XInput.

2. Assign player slots

Map each connected controller handle to a player slot so guests joining mid-session each get their own character rather than sharing the host's input.

3. Handle hot-join

Watch for new controller handles appearing while running, since guests can join after launch, and add them to the active player set without a restart.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

A crash you can name from its stack trace is a crash you can usually fix in minutes.