The effort to squash unlicensed controllers hurts plenty of paying customers, and might not even achieve its goals
What a horrible decision all around.
- Generates e-waste as controllers are bricked for no reason.
- Kills costly custom built accessibility controllers. No consideration for marginalized users whatsoever.
- Retroactively screws all customers over.
- Goes as far as breaking peripheral compatibility with a discontinued console.
Is it to kill cheating devices used on competitive titles? Is it a money grab? It probably won’t achieve either. From a customer protection standpoint I’m wondering if this position can be attacked legally.
Nevertheless it reminds me that other time when Spencer was daydreaming about buying Nintendo and it feels like Microsoft is being a little unhinged as of late.
Microsoft needs to seriously work on quality control of their own controllers… cynics might say they are built to fail
I seriously considered getting one for my wife about 6 months ago. She’s a casual controller gamer on her laptop, so I thought I’d spring for something with a little quality for her.
I had an official Xbox controller in my hand ready to check out and decided against it because when I looked, there were so many accounts of the controller just falling apart on people. It’s not worth paying a premium $80 for a controller that doesn’t last a year.
She still plays on a 10 year old black 360 controller with a wireless adapter and has zero problems.
I bought a wireless 360 controller when they were current, and an Xbone controller around when the slim launched. Guess which one still works.
dang i had not heard about this unlicensed controllers thing. I find this move very baffling, given Microsoft’s current position in the gaming market. This is the kind of move you make when you are in first place, because you have market dominance to shield your company from the effects of bad publicity. Yet in spite of two massive acquisitions, Xbox is still the third-place console. And after 3 years of the Xbox SeX and PS5, it’s kind of looking like they’re going to stay in last place unless they start packing their release calendar with A-tier exclusives.
So if Xbox is still in last place, why are they going out of their way to burn the goodwill they’ve been building up over the last 6 years?
Remember when xbox was the console? Like, the weird anime kid had a PS3 and everybody else had 360s. How did they lose that much of a lead?
Those were the days when paid Xbox Live service was way better than the free PS network. If you wanted to play online, the experience was much better on Xbox. Sony’s online experience has vastly improved since then, and their first-party games are generally considered much higher quality than Microsoft’s alternatives.
This explains how Sony clawed back market share in the second half of the PS3 gen, but you’re missing one crucial detail: the Xbox One. One cannot overstate how badly Microsoft misread the room and flubbed the reveal of the XbOne. The all-digital announcement in a time when physical games were still king, the required Kinect, the always-online requirement…they basically wrote the playbook on how to piss off reddit gamers. Sony had built up good will by becoming more pro-consumer over the PS3 gen, so then all they had to do in 2013 was say “the PS4 is just like the PS3 but better” and they were heralded as the saviors of gaming.
The more I read about this the more baffling the move seems. It’s not going to end cheating. It might inconvenience cheaters, if even that and it’s only going to create negative PR for Microsoft, especially since this is impacting people who use modified controllers for accessibility issues. It’s especially weird given how carefully Microsoft has tried to craft an image of being “pro-consumer” this console generation. Then again I imagine the executives who make these decisions rarely think these things through. At the very least it is a good reminder that there is no such thing as a pro-consumer for-profit corporation.
Laughable selling this as “Improving gamer experience” breaking another existing standard.
Saying this especially from the DIY angle where custom controllers are kinda the thing.
Also lol because “competitive” gameplay. Gear always wins the day - just like in meat space.
Ah well, one good thing may come from this: Plenty of cheaper second hand controllers that I may buy as replacements to connect to my Steam Link. This one isn’t too picky when it comes to controllers. My current mix on that is a Steam Controller, a Wii-U controller and some no-name “works-on-all” wireless controller.
I despise this decision. I should be able to tailor my experience to my liking, especially since I don’t play games online. What’s the harm in letting me have a joypad with six buttons on the front? It’s literally what Capcom fighting games are designed to use. Why can’t I have a D-pad that works well with fighting games? The Xbox Series controller is better than last generation’s joypad (and much better than the generation before that), but for some of us, it’s still not good enough.
Also, it’s unlikely that 8bitdo will buy a license to make controllers for the Xbox. It’s the least popular console of this generation. You’re charging for the right to make controllers for a game system that’s well behind its competitors. Why do that when you can make controllers for the Switch or the PC, where you can sell more product at a lower cost? It’s just… stupid.
8bitdo (and the other major 3rd party controller makers) have a license. Their controllers are even advertised on Microsoft’s site - e.g. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/mobile-gaming/sn30-pro
[Edit: @[email protected] points out correctly that this controller does not with with Xbox - it’s for mobile. Oops. There are some that do though - see later replies!]
That controller doesn’t actually work with an Xbox Series though, right? It’s for cloud gaming.
Ugh, you’re right, Way to undermine my own point! There are no official third party wireless controllers.
8BitDo do make licensed controllers that work with Xbox though - for example: https://www.8bitdo.com/pro2-wired-controller-for-xbox/ and https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/ultimate-wired-controller-for-xbox
[Edit: and there are a bunch of wired third party controllers on Microsoft’s store from other manufacturers: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories?xr=shellnav]
Why wouldn’t 8bitdo buy a license? There are one 3 gaming consoles, so being 3rd really makes no difference. And MS/Xbox still has a huge impact on the gaming industry.
I’m not defending the walled-garden decision, but the Xbox market is not small and this is unlikely to prevent controller manufacturers from supplying controllers to Xbox customers.
Well, what little interest I had for this console is now gone. Are they trying to pull another windows phone type move here?
If it weren’t for all the self-defeat, MS would be doing much better, I think.
Windows is trying to both maintain backwards compatibility and lock-in. That’s pretty hard at the best of times, moreso when you didn’t initially have lock-in. If I can get my games working on Linux (i hear it’spossible, but I need time), the only reason I’ll have to use Windows will be work-related.
My new job has me doing a lot with Linux. Might be the push I need to just pull the trigger. Certainly the OS is cheaper.
@Quexotic @GreyEyedGhost for what it’s worth I’ve been working on Linux servers professionally for 15 years and I use a windows desktop and an osx laptop both personally and for work. I can’t think of a particular advantage a Linux client environment would give you. The last thing I want to do in either place is extra work making my local environment functional.
Me too, but as much time as I’d spend decrapifying windows, I could spend learning Linux
Does this mean we can expect a glut of cheap 3rd party controllers on the market that can be used for PC gaming?
when will the industry learn that noone wants propriety hardware or software
Just as soon as it becomes profitable to care about what the consumer wants.
Because clearly, we think things through before we do them
Is there some kind of DRM/authentication scheme in certified controllers, or is it just looking at the device VID/PID?
If not then third-party controllers could just offer a firmware update to spoof the vendorID and productID.
Yes, there’s a proprietary authentication mechanism. It’s been used in all controllers from the Xbox One, released in 2013, onward. At the moment, at least publicly, it remains uncracked. That’s actually quite impressive!
I think a lot of people are interpreting this news to mean that all third party Xbox controllers will stop working. Controllers from the likes of PowerA, Razer or 8bitdo. But they will still work. They are licensed by Microsoft and contain their proprietary authentication processors.
Some third party accessories like the Cronos Zen allow other controllers (Joysticks, wheels, PC gamepads, Playstation controllers etc.) to work with Xbox - and also often contain ‘cheat’ mechanisms (like automatic direction input to compensate for gun recoil in shooters). They require you to connect an authentic Xbox controller to them and hijack communication to do ‘authentication’ via the authentic controller. Perhaps Microsoft has worked out a way to detect this?
Lastly, there are some cheap third party controllers, often from Chinese manufacturers, that seem, at the moment, to ‘just work’ without being licensed by Microsoft. General online consensus seems to be that they’re using recycled authentication chips - but perhaps some contain cracked copies of the algorithm and Microsoft has figured out a way to tell?
It’s these last two categories that Microsoft is presumably cracking down on.
At the moment, at least publicly, it remains uncracked. That’s actually quite impressive!
Necessity is the mother of invention.
