Removing Launch Pad when pressing the PS button on macOS Ventura

I hooked up my PS5 controller to my Mac Studio on previous occasions, but never noticed how the Launch Pad comes up in a Games folder, so that we can launch stand-alone apps without the need for a mouse and keyboard. While helpful in principle, I prefer to use the Steam client to bring up its own menu, as it does on the Steam Deck.

Naturally Apple have REMOVED the option to make this selectable since macOS 13 Ventura because… nobody knows. Thankfully there’s still a way to remove this feature with the following terminal command. No admin privileges or reboots are necessary:

defaults write com.apple.GameController bluetoothPrefsMenuLongPressAction -integer 0

That’s it! Press the PS button now and nothing happens on the operating system level, but Steam still brings up its menu. How do we bring it back? I have no idea, probably with the same command and a 1 at the end instead of the 0.

Thanks to Thinkr on Stack Overflow for this tip.

• https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/449877/ps-button-on-dualsense-controller-forces-opening-launchpad-on-ventura