It’s quite common thing for keyboards, see this as an example.

https://github.com/denilsonsa/udev-joystick-blacklist

Since this happens to you often, I’d strongly recommend ruling out hardware issues. First, check you RAM with Memtest86 or similiar tool for a few runs. Bad RAM will eventually corrupt your file system, so do it before you lose any important data. Then check your storage health, and while at it, if your games are not installed on a ext4 file system, make sure you create one for testing. Last, make sure you have enough space on your game library partition.

Next, gather data. Are the games that fail windows or native titles? Wine sometimes crashes and leaves processes running and running the application again fails. Check with ‘ps’ command or your favorite GUI tool. Check the logs of your game launcher, wine and the game it self. System log aka journal may have some info too. Journal is unlikely to have useful info in this case, but still it’s worth to take a look incase it’s some wierd issue with network, GPU, etc.

Lutris forums have troubleshooting section. There is a sticky post “Please read before asking for help”, that covers the details about logs. Other threads there will be good sources to learn.

I hope you’re able to fix your issue.

Regression aren’t fun. To solve them, you need to do proper debugging.

First, take a look into logs. See the Proton readme on Proton logs, and Arch wiki’s article of journalctl on system logs. Also games have their own logs. When you have found a suspicious error, copy-paste it to your favorite search engine. Eg. Steam prints errors about game overlay on each start, and those are harmless.

Another option is to take a look into the issue tracker to see, if someone else has the same issue and found a workaround.

Third method is regression testing. It means going back to a working version, and testing each update to find out which one introduces the bug.

If these sound like a lot of work, it’s because they are. That’s why people often try random stuff that may fix the issue, or break your system, instead doing proper debugging. I personally don’t have time for it, so I have given up running rolling release distros.

I hope someone is able to give you the actual fix for your issue.

I didn’t find anything on Valve’s issue tracker with a quick search, but maybe you’d like to investigate deeper.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues?q=is%3Aissue+state%3Aopen

You could take a look at game’s logs. For Windows titles, enable logs in Proton by adding PROTON_LOG=1 to launch properties, see README for details.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/blob/proton_11.0/README.md#runtime-config-options

I would absolutely not want it to work as a controller outside Steam. In initial mode, aka lizard mode, it works as a keyboard and mouse because they want it to be able to boot your OS. That way you can even use it to manage your UEFI settings. Even in bluetooth mode, the og. SC works initially as a mouse. It’s designed for HTPCs after all.