Xbox’s new policy — say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November thanks to error ‘0x82d60002’::Got error 0x82d60002 on your Xbox accessory? There’s no fix, Xbox is going to block the use of detected unauthorized accessories with its consoles from November 12, 2023.
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.
They really can’t though. Which is why the article shows a shitty controller somebody bought on Wish.
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.