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Xbox's new policy — say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November thanks to error '0x82d60002'
(www.windowscentral.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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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:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAC-2
I have a pair that must be almost 40 years old now, still work!
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.
They really can't though. Which is why the article shows a shitty controller somebody bought on Wish.
The PC has... No official accessories mate
"Xbox's policy", we aren't talking about PC. But yeah, once you get away from the name brands, a large portion of PC controllers are garbage as well.
"all platforms" because apparently you can't read your own posts.
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.
NYXI makes dope joycons. definetely give them a look.
Haha thanks that's actually what I went with.
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.
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.
Drift on official controllers disagrees.
They aren't blocking 3rd party accessories. They'e blocking UNLICENSED 3rd party accessories. Different beast.
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.
And I'd imagine they'll be willing to go through licensing.
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.
There are lots of great ones and lots of bad ones. As a consumer, you have options.
This is nothing more than another pointless revenue stream for Microsoft that the consumer will ultimately pay for, much like Apple and Lightning.