Steelseries’ Stratus iOS 7 gamepad is now available

‘Real’ console gaming is now live on Apple’s devices.

Well, here we are. Steelseries’ Stratus has officially hit retail stores and brought a whole new age for Apple gaming along with it. The little pad features pretty much everything and anything you could expect from a full-fledged ‘console’ controller and attaches wirelessly to your iDevice via Bluetooth. You can use any game that’s been developed to be compatible with iOS 7’s new native controller capabilities with it too, so there are no limits on that. The only shortcoming really is that there’s a finite list of games right now that do support controllers. Though now that they’re actually getting out there in the wild, that list is only going to get bigger. It makes little sense to get controller support out of Apple after years of asking for it, especially from a developer’s position, and then not use it.

To make the Stratus even more tempting, Steelseries has dropped the price for anyone who buys one during the launch window (and anyone who preordered) to $79.99 USD. That’s twenty bucks cheaper than normal and not really all that much more than a pad for the Xbox 360 or PS3 would cost you.  No word on when that price might jump back up to the former $99.99 level, but if you want one of these bad boys now’s probably a good time to grab one.

The Steelseries Stratus is available right now from steelseries.com, Apple.com and in the Apple Store. Just a quick note here that as of this writing, the Apple.com page for the Stratus hasn’t been changed from $99.99 to $79.99, so you may want to order direct or grab one at the brick and mortar Apple Store. Or just wait a day; I’m sure they’ll have it updated pretty soon.