Easy enough. I won’t be buying the Xbox. Ever.
Thanks Microsoft!
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Maybe it’s because I’m not a hardcore gamer, and loathe online multiplayer generally (the multiplayer modes of most games are so boring), but I remain unconvinced. 'Cuz a) if multiplayer cheating is an issue, seems to me that’s a problem for the individual game companies to address in-game, and it’s not up to Microsoft to police it, and b) Microsoft excluding all but its controllers for Xbox wouldn’t address the almost-certain pretext of “cheating” in the huge number of games that have cross-platform play.
Seems like their motive is almost certainly anti-competitive monopolism.
It’s why I avoid consoles like the plague.
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This is a terrible look and I think a terrible experience IMO.
Aren’t all 3rd party controllers for Playstation already required to be licenced? This just seems like MS (sadly) leaving their rather liberal “anything with Xinput goes” approach for a more industry standard one.
As for those above talking about accessible controllers for disabled gamers, remember that MS makes the widely acclaimed Xbox accessible controller, which supports all manner of external buttons or other inputs through simple 3.5mm jacks. This policy change won’t affect that whatsoever.
ETA: @beschizza, can you please edit the headline to not be so grossly misleading? They’re not moving to block third party accessories, they’re moving to block unlicensed accessories. Which is an entirely different category of things.
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Unfortunately, talking about input devices that’s generally beyond the reach of software developers ability to interrogate. APIs, SDKs, whatnot all abstract that far away, so the game just sees “input x happened” and then responds accordingly.
Developers are trying everything they can to get ahead of this, blocking hardware input cheat devices is a thing devs are asking for.
Also, it’s worth pointing out- this isn’t a move to make it only Microsoft controllers, just Xbox controllers that have been produced by companies who have joined their partner program. There are a lot of companies that are already are a part of this, and have been for years. In truth, this is going to affect a very small minority of hardware, mostly cheat devices and generic asian e-waste.
Companies like Hori, 8bitdo, etc have been partners and will be unaffected.
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You’re right to some degree, but you see how this raises the bar for cheating through controllers quite a bit, right? The adaptive controller is $100 and needs further accessories (which, for the record, is mind-bogglingly cheap for a fully customizable accessible controller like that - previous solutions have typically cost many times more) and doesn’t generally allow for the type of functionality people want in cheat-oriented controllers, and any modded controller takes serious effort to make, or money to buy.
Xinput is an openly accessible standard, so previous to this anyone could make an Xbox and PC compatible Xinput controller with whatever hacky functionality they wanted for very cheap, using off-the-shelf hardware, just with whatever shell design, extra buttons and/or firmware functionality they wanted. As such a controller is unlikely to be allowed under licence, now those will be limited to PC only, massively reducing the market for such controllers. And that is purely a good thing.
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I guess it’ll raise the cheating bar to those who can hack a Microsoft controller to add that “functionality”.
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Ah, gotcha.
Ok, now THIS seems reasonable.
Unfortunately cheating, like so many other things, is a never ending arms race.
The only thing that works is to make it cost prohibitive enough that it’s not worth it. Minimizing the sale of commercially available, easy to use, devices is a step, but not the solution.
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Totally valid, and reasonable concerns.
It feels like the best possible outcome would be for Microsoft to make joining their Partner program as frictionless as possible. If the goal is remove “bad” devices, there is nothing but upside to onboarding as many accessible gaming partners as possible.
(edit: worth pointing out that they raise concerns about the quadstick. Not only are they an MS Partner, they are actually featured on the Xbox accessibility page)
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by changing it at the software level, they’re in control in a way they weren’t before. for instance, they could decide partnering with a particular company isn’t worth it anymore and unilaterally remove all of those devices - even if those devices were licensed at the time they were produced and sold
it’s hard for me to see this as anything other than anti consumer. if they wanted to specifically address cheating they could make a flag for developers to check, creating “licensed controller sessions” or “licensed controller matchs” for that slice of games where it might matter
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That would likely give them all kinds of legal trouble (at least in regions with somewhat functioning consumer protection bureaus) and piss off literally every single person to buy one of those devices, so that’s pretty nlikely to happen. Retroactively banning a company’s hardware doesn’t hurt the company either - they’ve already made those sales, so it doesn’t even make sense by corporate logic.
Also, I assume you’re aware that console accessories have pretty much always been controlled through licencing schemes, most of which have historically been very strictly policed? AFAIK these things are noticeably more lax these days, even with this new restriction. There have of course always been companies trying to circumvent licencing programmes and selling unlicenced hardware, but this has often been relegated to gray market sales and junk quality items - though not always, of course. But for significant periods of time, lack of a licencing mark has equated to a de facto sales ban in many regions for a lot of accessories.
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Okay, let’s try this again. First, some basic facts you need to know: cheats for games, including hardware used to cheat, is a pretty significant industry, with a lot of money involved. Most of which is of course in legal gray zones as these cheats generally break any kind of EULA involved with any relevant hardware or software, meaning that the people producing and selling these things for profit typically aren’t the most up-and-up types of people.
From this, as MrChristian has pointed to above, stems the ongoing problem of whack-a-mole anti-cheat solutions, as both software and hardware providers need to constantly try to detect new cheats that appear (which appear frequently and with a lot of creativity, as the money involved is a strong incentive) while also staying as close to 0% false positives as possible. Hopefully it is reasonably obvious that this is not an easy task, and one that takes constant, ongoing work, and work that transcends the walled garden available to console software developers, necessitating the involvement of developers with deeper system access.
Placing the responsibility for fighting cheaters with game developers would amount to surrendering entirely, as anyone outside of behemoth developer/publishers like EA, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard etc. would be entirely unable to keep up. Even those companies barely can. They are entirely dependent on third parties - whether platform owners (including Valve and other PC gaming platform owners) or anti-cheat software develpers (like the absolutely horrible Denuvo). And, of course, on consoles there are strict limitations to what developers have access to, limiting their capabilities for detecting and fighting cheating in the first place. Now imagine that a mid-sized indie developer of, say, 100 people, just having launched a surprisingly popular multiplayer title should do. Should they dedicate their entire staff to fighting cheaters? Even that would likely not be sufficient. And, of course, that would leave them unable to maintain their games or develop new ones. Then think of even smaller development teams (which are the vast majority of game development teams). In short: asking developers to deal with issues like this is an incredibly poorly thought through idea.
Further, and this isn’t fully your fault, you seem to have latched on to the rather misleading title of the BB post here rather than the actual substance of this change - they are by no means banning third-party accessories, just unlicenced ones. And this is nothing new - the console industry has run on lincencing programmes for accessories for decades, and these programmes have been far stricter and more draconian previously than they are currently.
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Nah, I’m good. Frankly I think it’s pretty weird that you’re still trying to address me after multiple removed posts. Let it go.
I mentioned the adaptive controller because I was responding to someone who mentioned ADA concerns(since talking up how they offer such a peripheral would be the most obvious counter-argument on MS’ part were that to come up); and because it is a demonstration that there’s a first party controller that is explicitly designed to accept arbitrary inputs, which suggests a (fairly low) upper bound on the difficulty of laundering your choice of inputs through an official peripheral.
My suspicion is that commercial cheat-oriented products would probably be based standard controllers(either fully functional ones with supplemental flex PCBs in strategic places, if the customer still wants a controller but with a little extra; or the interface chip out of a damaged one being puppetted if it’s just there to launder the inputs from something else entirely; since controllers with significant button/stick damage and/or shot batteries look to be the cheapest source of authentic controller ICs by a fair margin); rather than the accessibility controller.
(edit: apparently it’s even easier than that: I’d assumed that MS was encrypting traffic between the xbox and the controller, which would require injecting inputs upstream of the official controller chip; but apparently some of the unlicensed stuff supports having an unmodified OEM controller connected to it to be used to pass authentication; so apparently injection downstream of the official controller is viable.)
Definitely still a barrier to entry: looks like you are talking $20 or so (at least in low quantities, no idea where in the mysterious world of e-waste logistics you’d go shopping for the bulk price) vs. just choosing your own microcontroller and doing whatever; but seems like a barrier tall enough to be an effective bludgeon against anyone just trying to compete on controllers while being pretty low (we’re talking 1/3-1/2 the cost of a single game for something likely to be of ongoing use) against anything but the most casual or impecunious cheaters.
That seems a long way from ‘purely a good thing’.
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personally, i hope what they’re doing now gets them into legal trouble! but if buying activision didn’t trigger the needed monopoly response, it’s vanishing unlikely this will.
for me: i’m not a fan of buying hardware, and then being told what i can and cannot do with it. by that metric things are already in a poor state and this change makes it worse.
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I don’t disagree with you, but consoles have always been pretty strictly enforced walled gardens, and while this is bad in many ways, it also comes with a lot of advantages for users - things console users actively seek out and want (generally the “it just works” type of simplicity). In short, consoles are explicitly made for delimited use - they’re meant to be appliances, not tinker toys - so for all such hardware you buy your use of it is determined by the platform owner. If this isn’t okay for you, consoles aren’t for you, and never have been. This change IMO doesn’t move the needle much on that.
As for the legal trouble, we seem to have different views of the state of current regulations and enforcement. Antitrust, anti-monopoly laws, and the organizations meant to enforce them have been pretty effectively defanged decades ago. The actions needed to trigger that kind of response are so extreme this doesn’t even come close to being relevant here - as aptly exemplified by the Activision merger. What tends to be somewhat more functional are consumer protection regulations, which is where any kind of broad reaching post-purchase kill switch along the lines of what you described would be quite likely to trigger a response, at least from the EU.
Also, perhaps sadly for those who still want to tinker with their consoles and accessories, their desire for this needs to be a lower priority than attempting to maintain low levels of cheating for the tens of millions of people playing competitive multiplayer games. And sadly the prevalence of bad actors willing to take any opportunity available to make money despite this ruining the fun for everyone else means that very few concessions can be made on a closed platform.
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I think you’re underestimating the barrier here - the change from “anyone with the ability to program an arduino with a slightly modified version of a library from github” to “injecting inputs downstream of the controller on a USB connection” is… well, not insignificant? Essentially it excludes all but the most dedicated and knowledgeable DIYer/hobbyist/small scale operation from creating input devices like this. They base hardware price isn’t the issue, the complexity is. (Though final hardware prices from what I’ve seen tend to be much higher than the component pricing you’re quoting here.)
Can it still be done? Obviously. But a higher technical barrier to entry forces professionalisation and consolidation of the operations making these, which at least in some ways makes them easier to root out while avoiding false positives.
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Can’t wait for itch.io to follow suit, demanding more USI 3.0 controller games…
