lol as if politicians care about regulating monopolies any more… MS already got in trouble in the past for ONLY bundling their browser with the OS. They do so much worse these days and the paid-for government cheers it on…
To be clear, they’re not requiring us to buy Xbox brand official controllers. They’re requiring “authorized” controllers, which includes a lot of third-party brands. That’s still kinda shitty, but I don’t think it counts as tying.
Whether or not that “counts as infringement” is debatable, as stuff like this is pretty commonplace in the tech industry. See: Apple. If you want to spend the cash to lawyer up and take this issue to the Supreme Court, I support you.
What property right is violated? Genuine question.
The owner of the Xbox can buy and use whatever accessories they want. You just can’t expect them to let you access their network, not being able to be offline is a different matter of shitty practice but nothing about this is illegal, at least in the US.
Historically, 3rd party accessories on all platforms have been garbage. Glad to see them cracking down. There are rare exceptions like this Atari 2600 joystick:
Call me old-fashioned, but I think the free market offers an adequate solution for this—customers can tell for themselves which third-party accessories are bad and not buy them. Microsoft shouldn’t purposefully render them unusable. If you want guaranteed support, you’re always free to choose an official product.
Except the controllers who are doing external scripting are the best selling 3rd party controllers. So the free market has been pretty clear in that they don’t care if it’s a good product, they only care if it gives them an unfair advantage.
Letting the free market continue to regulate this means no change from the horrific state of controller based cheating that exists right now.
If PC players and PC games can handle cheating without needing to resort to banning third-party controllers, I see no reason that Microsoft magically needs to do so.
They’re just not widely used on pc. They can be, they just haven’t been adopted by cheaters as much on pc vs console.
Microsoft should have banned these controllers years ago tbh. There’s no way for game developers to reliably ban players using them. The problem is that they haven’t been able to handle cheating up to this point.
I do not find this argument very convincing. There are much harder-to-detect ways to cheat on PC and yet anti-cheat systems remain fairly effective. Remember that an XBOX is, from a software standpoint, just a Windows computer with far less functionality and some tweaks for performance. There are black-box cheat detection techniques.
There is no way you can paint this move as pro-consumer. It’s an anti-consumer move with some positive side effects.
Anti-cheats aren’t very effective on PC. For example EasyAntiCheat us known to be the easiest to bypass. These aren’t software level cheats, they’re hardware level and then translating inputs into new “valid” looking inputs. This is next to impossible to detect from client or server side. That’s why this has to be done.
No black box cheat detection has been widely worked out yet. Multiple games have tried to varying degrees of success, about this issue particularly. It hasn’t worked, that’s why more extreme measures are now being taken.
There’s no downside other than shitty controllers and cheating controllers being taken off the market.
Regardless of any amount of argumentation, the end result is that cheating on PC isn’t really that big of a problem.
Sometimes people want to use “shitty controllers” though. They’re much cheaper than official ones and in many cases work just as well. In my case, I have a $25 controller I bought off Amazon for my Nintendo Switch that also works for my PC and has RBG lighting and wired/wireless dual mode. It in all respects is better than a $70 official Nintendo controller and I suspect it’s the same for XBOX.
I mean, yeah, it’s true historically that first party has been generally better in quality. Going all the way back. But that does not mean it’s cool to block third party accessories.
Basically just means anything that is even mildly competitive in terms of price. Any licensed third party gear is the exact same price as the official accessories.
I’m not sure why you are defending moves clearly meant to fuck the consumer.
Because selling consumers cheap trash that they have to replace multiple times is worse for them than charging a higher price for a licensed product.
We’ve been over this across multiple generations. 3rd party controllers, 3rd party memory cards, they all sucked. Cheap? Yes. Very cheap, but if they’re half the price and you have to replace them 3 times, they stop being cheap.
Not that some official products are any better, the Elite controllers continue to be garbage and have spawned class action lawsuits.
Nowadays there are many 3rd party options that are better than any official offerings. Especially considering no 1st party has made the switch to hall effect joysticks.
Nah they’ll most likely find a work around, can’t imagine the check being hard to clear unless they are planning to add hardware identifiers and make all old official controllers obsolete.
I picked up this one about 6 mo ago and it’s been fantastic. My favorite controller by far. I’m waiting for them to make joycons and they’ll be an immediate buy.
I don’t need Microsoft telling me how to spend my money and they were definitely some good quality 3rd party stuff.
Honestly, I’ve seen a clear drop in quality since Microsoft killed or bought most of their competition for the official products. I didn’t use to replace my remotes (3rd party or official) but now I need to at least once a year with the official ones which are now also three times the price.
Microsoft doesn’t care about you, they actively hate you. You are money bag they suck on. No matter what the boot says, less competition is ALWAYS bad for the consumer.
Just because you don’t like them doesn’t mean other people don’t.
As a kid I had no hope of affording the official PlayStation racing wheel, but I could afford the MadCatz one. When I wanted a 2nd guitar controller to play with friends on the PS2, NYKO offered a wireless one that was much better than the official ones. My first wireless controller, before the WaveBird, was a MadCatz PS2 controller that was fantastic.
I spent a good chunk of this weekend researching 3rd party JoyCons because the ones from Nintendo are basically cheap novelty toys that sell for $80.
8BitDo have been making quality controllers for several years now, and they have a whole section of their website dedicated to Xbox stuff. They appear to be licensed, so they will probably still be good?
Especially with how expensive 1st party controllers are, it can make a ton of sense to get cheap 3rd party ones. Especially if you aren’t into hardcore or competitive games.
I went with the Wizard because I always thought the GameCube controller was fine. Not my favorite, not terrible. But I’m at least familiar with it. I saw some reviews mention that the QA and build quality might be a problem, and if that’s the case my next option is probably to try the Hyperion Pro.
Honestly I wish I could rip the controls off the Steam Deck or rip a DualSense in half.
“Made for Xbox” branding for proprietary accessories approved by Microsoft incoming. Anything else won’t work.
How hypocritical of MS to pull this on their consumers after making it such a big deal that competitors like Apple do this same thing. Pot meet Kettle.
Anyone surprised? MS is one of the shadiest companies out there. Google gathering user data? “Don’t get scroogled!” Microsoft account required for windows 11? That’s completely different. Gamers in particular just fell for their self-imposed image as the good guys because of Game pass and constantly bashing their competitors.
If I remember correctly, it was them first charging for online services under Xbox Live Gold for functionality that was usually free on PC.
Going way back to the beginnings of both companies, yes. Apple had the ‘walled garden’, where the idea was that you were safer with all things ‘Apple Approved’.
Microsoft and most of the industry went the other way at the time and MS grew exponentially.
I abandoned Xbox back when they announced Xbox One and said it required a Kinect and would be always online for DRM purposes. The backlash was severe enough that I remember their stock price taking a hit and that Major Tom dude having to come out and backtrack.
I knew then and there that they’d always try to bring this DRM/hyper controlling nonsense back. Just didn’t think it’d take them so long.
I jumped over to Playstation and I can’t say I’m having a bad time. Some great exclusives have come out. Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man 1 (I’m too poor for Spider-Man 2 so have no opinions), Bloodborne, God of War… Been a nice time and same here on Halo being the only thing I missed.
I was going to get Xbox (whatever the random name for this next gen is) for Christmas and have been with Microsoft since the 360, but now I’m moving back to the PlayStation 5. Granted, I’m barely a gamer and use it more as a media center than a game console, but even I’m getting tired of Microsoft. I’ve been off of their operating system since college so gaming is the last Microsoft product I had.
Gentoo is mostly for people who like to have maximum control over their OS and custom compile software they use.
Even if you have a beefy hardware, updates will take some time, and unless you want to study the compile flags, you will end up with the same binary builds you would on any other distro.
Yes, unless you actually care about compiling blutooth out of your packages (it’s fcking everywhere, whyy), just go with anything else.
The beauty of Linux is that you can do everything in every distro. Nothing stops you from installing Zorin and putting Portage (Gentoo package/build manager) on it. But if you just want to use software as-is, just use whatever. Pop should have better nvidia drivers for cards they ship with System76, Mint is less corporate Ubuntu, Zorin I’ve never tried.
Where was this outrage when Xbox blocked the ability to use third party headsets? This just seems like a continuation of their long-held policy and is likely only happening now that they have their accessibility controller on the market.
Seems like any customer rights now only exist in direct defiance of corporations and whatever unreasonable unilateral rules they set without consulting anyone else.
“it’s all just for your protection!” I’m amazed that people actually believe this shit. That’s the same argument as with various countries fighting against CSAM, seeing that as an excuse for total privacy invasion. Like come on…
No one believes it, but in the world of PR you just go with the thing people are least likely to argue against or most likely believe “for the children” or “because safety”. PR doesn’t really even matter when you’re so enormous.
I never gamed on console because I like more control over my environment…and that started 25 years ago. Super glad they were just approved to buy Activision/Blizzard, “more choice” was what their grinning exec said in a consolidation purchase.
Enshittification advances. Consoles already are the prime example of devices that act as if they are still owned by the company rather than the customer, but they somehow find even more ways to make it worse...
Baldur’s gate 3 for me while I waited for the mac release. Valheim before that. I only use it for probably three or four months a year, but I got the founders rate at five dollars a month so it’s more than worth it to keep paying for it.
Going to have a controversial opinion here, but as someone who primarily plays competitive FPS games this is a huge win. Strike Packs have been dominating console lobbies for years now. Controllers that do scripting won’t work anymore, and that’s a massive W.
It’s not universally good, and they’ll need to expand the authorization program, but imo it’s well worth it to ban the cheaters using 3rd party controllers.
Edit: Downvote as much as you want. I’m fed up dealing with console players cheating with controllers they can buy from walmart. This is a huge positive for anyone who wants people to stop cheating.
Most software cheats do. Hardware cheats are much more common on console. Strike Packs can be bought at the local Walmart. There’s no barrier to entry at all.
As a user of third-party controllers on the PS4: yup, the DualShock 4 security is a pain. And the DualSense security hasn’t been cracked yet - the closest gadget I’ve found actually uses Remote Play to bypass the authentication requirement.
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