Joy-Cons on a Windows PC: the complete guide

The problem with Joy-Cons on Windows

Pair Joy-Cons straight to a PC and you'll hit the same wall everyone does: Windows sees two separate devices — a left half and a right half — and has no built-in way to combine them. Games either see nothing usable or two broken "controllers" with half the buttons each. The usual workarounds each come with a catch:

• Steam merges Joy-Cons natively — but only inside Steam. Launch Fortnite, Minecraft, an emulator or anything from another launcher and you're back to two useless halves.
• BetterJoy merges them system-wide — but it needs your PC to have Bluetooth, a kernel driver install (ViGEmBus), admin rights, and it's a community project with hundreds of open issues.
• Paid remappers do it more politely — for money, and they still need PC Bluetooth.

There's a simpler route: don't connect the Joy-Cons to the PC at all.

Connect Joy-Cons to your PC in three steps

1. Install the free PC receiver. Download the small Windows tray app and run it — it sets up the virtual-controller driver and a firewall rule for you on first launch.
2. Pair both Joy-Cons to your phone. Hold the little round sync button on the rail of each half until the lights sweep, then pick Joy-Con (L) and Joy-Con (R) in Android's Bluetooth settings.
3. Open Controller Gateway, tap Find PC, then Start. The app shows one controller — Joy-Con (L + R) — and your PC sees one normal Xbox pad.

ZL and ZR act as the triggers, Minus and Plus are Back and Start, Capture is the guide button, and the sticks are full analogue. One merged pair counts as one controller, so it's free — the £2.99 unlock is only for adding more pads.

Two players from one Joy-Con pair

The Switch's party trick works on your PC too. Flip "Use Joy-Cons as one controller" off in the app and each half becomes its own sideways mini gamepad, held horizontally like on the Switch: the stick is rotated so up is up, the left half's D-pad becomes the face buttons, and SL/SR become the shoulder buttons. Your PC sees two separate Xbox pads — instant couch co-op from hardware you already own. (Two controllers at once needs the one-time £2.99 unlock; the merged single pad is free forever.)

Joy-Cons not working on PC? The usual suspects

If you've been fighting a direct Bluetooth connection, these are the failures behind almost every forum thread — and why the phone-relay route sidesteps them:

• "Windows sees two controllers." That's just what Joy-Cons are over Bluetooth. Nothing in Windows merges them; you need Steam (Steam-only), BetterJoy (drivers + PC Bluetooth) or a relay that merges before Windows ever sees them.
• "They won't reconnect after switching off." A known Windows Bluetooth ritual: remove the device and re-pair, every time. Phones handle Joy-Con reconnection far more gracefully — and the PC side of a relay never re-pairs anything.
• "One Joy-Con drops when I connect the second." Cheap PC Bluetooth adapters struggle with two simultaneous low-latency connections. A phone's radio is built for exactly that.
• "BetterJoy can't start ViGEmBus" / driver errors. The driver stack needs admin rights and occasionally a reinstall; the underlying ViGEmBus project is no longer actively developed. If you'd rather not debug kernel drivers, keep the merging off the PC entirely.
• "Steam sees them but my game doesn't." Steam's merge lives inside Steam. Anything launched elsewhere needs the pad to exist at system level — which is what a relayed Xbox controller is.
• Third-party Joy-Cons (Nyxi, Binbok and friends) sometimes speak their own dialect and get rejected by PC tools. Most still pair to a phone as regular gamepads; if yours does, the relay treats it like any other pad.

Does the Wi-Fi hop add lag?

Barely. The relay is a handful of tiny UDP packets on your local network — around 1–5 ms on normal 5 GHz home Wi-Fi, comfortably under a single 60 Hz frame. It feels like a wired pad for everything short of frame-perfect fighting games.

Frequently asked