They've gone into every xbox owner's house and destroyed their property with prejudice. 3rd party controllers, all of them, including all never used to cheat become non-functional and worthless.
At that point I don't give a flying fig what excuse they are using. Neither should the law when it comes to wanton destruction of property. Property rights are a thing!
If you don't have power over the software running on the hardware, it ain't your hardware. Force the consoles to be open and give power back to the users.
It’s always fun to see that viewpoint run face-first into real life, as it inevitably and immediately devolves into a cesspool of cheating that either drives everyone off the platform or loops back around to being forced to run anti-cheat software you don’t have power over.
These vapid comments about freedom
And abstract notions of ownership always strike me as naively and comically libertarian
"Won't someone please think of the children^W cheaters?" This argument is preposterous. If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client. Meanwhile, these draconian anti-multiplayer-cheating methods obliterate single-player-game freedoms by removing all potential for modding, which is the only good thing about the medium of gaming these days.
These vapid comments about convenience over freedom and short-sighted notions of corporate control over our devices always strike me as naively and comically authoritarian.
> If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client
Yep, but that would result in no games being commercially viable, and so no games existing.
So there needs to be a compromise in order for those games to exist.
It you want to play a mod friendly game, then… go play one? Lots exist.
Or invent a way to allow anyone to modify and run their game clients in any way they want to preserve abstract notions of freedom whilst also preventing them from modifying and running their game clients in a way that hurts the experience of others.
> "Won't someone please think of the children^W cheaters?" This argument is preposterous. If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client."
This isn't really enough these days. There's proof-of-concept videos on YouTube of people developing ML-Image Recognition aimbots that move a physical mouse.
The time to do this was at the start of the generation or the next not mid way when people had invested in hardware. I think Sony already did this with the ps5, but from the get go so it’s fine
It’s just poor planning punishing xbox owners creating a ton of e waste
It is not all 3rd party controllers. It is "unauthorized accessory" controllers which excludes devices that are part of the "designed for Xbox” hardware partner program.
So they're willing to "authorize" all 3rd party controllers for no more than the cost of an engineer's time in examining each controller, regardless of who submitted it and paid?
Or can we acknowledge this for what it actually is, please.
or join with the authorities to maintain law and order.
You spin it as "cartel" but why can't it be spun as Law & Order?
Or do you think that cheaters should have unrestricted control and the ability to destroy the economy of any given game? You think people will play on platforms that aren't working to keep things even?
This is the same argument for P2W games where you can just pay to be the best. A few people will argue for that as they drop thousands to get those "rare" loot boxes and the rest will say "it's no fun to play a game against someone who's paying to be better than they really are".
To be fair, I think the vast majority of this is about online. Keeping a clean and hack free experience isn't just about selling proprietary controllers - it's also bout blocking cheating and keeping things sane.
(and single player games have Trophies which is online so... depending on how much you value pixelated trophies? those would be affected by "cheating in single player")
Remember... this is Microsoft. The same company that had YEARS of bad press because bad third party drivers was one of the largest causes of windows crashes.
So even if you never play online (I don't either) and only play single player games (FF and similar games here)? There's nothing worse than a shitty controller to ruin an experience.
It's possible some otherwise perfect controllers might lose their spot if they get "banned" because they aren't "upgraded" with "security chips" (or whatever) and you might be affected but in aggregate its something a company the size of MS has to take into account.
We'll see how it plays out but I'm not surprised (after reading comments about cheating stuff used by others in stuff like controllers).
You’re literally talking about creating a walled garden around what is currently an open ecosystem in which devices already purchased by people - including people with limited financial resources - will no longer work. All under the justification of ‘it solves cheating’. PC games have cheaters since forever, they’ve worked around that problem despite having less operating system and hardware control.
Not to mention the fact that eventually any hardware based controls will be circumvented - this is a device which converts mechanical actions to digital, so there’s nothing to stop physical control modifications.
The whole thing is either lazy, incompetent, or greedy, and won’t solve anything anyway.
"already purchased by people" Better talk to the EU that just forced Apple to negate a decade of iAccessories by forcing a switch to USB-C (which I support)
And even if "eventually controls will be circumvented" is true... making the barrier to entry harder gives them time to make back their investment (yes, the company deserves that). IE: DRM that eventually gets broken but not for a year can be the difference in the copies of a game sold being enough to make it a success or not.
The DRM also gives companies a path to suing companies that break the DRM. IE: Nintendo or Apple suing companies that jailbreak their stuff. Or you can be someone like Sony who has a PS5 that hasn't been jailbroken yet - making their platforms more resistant to cheating and thus more attractive to players who want a level playing field.
"won't solve anything anyways" Depends on your definition of "solve". If it takes 5+ years to fully jailbreak a PS5? Then that's successful. So even "broken" jailbreaks can be seen as successful in the long term.
There are negatives to these moves... but it's plain ignorance at best and dishonesty at worse to say there aren't justifiable reasons for companies like MS to take these steps.
> PC games have cheaters since forever, they’ve worked around that problem despite having less operating system and hardware control.
Have they though? Cheaters are rampant in most games, meanwhile consoles have been highly successfully in preventing cheaters from using things like wallhacks and aimbotting.
Once you get into certain skill levels in matchmaking it is very common to run into cheaters, depending on the game. If you think about above average lobbies, the number of cheaters will go up until you get to another MMR threshold just due to the fact that the cheats enable people to move up MMR. The average low MMR players will see less, and the top of MMR will see less, but the middle-upper bracket cheating is very, very bad.
Companies are trying to battle this with anti-cheats, heuristics, shadowbanning, etc but it is still noticeable at above-average MMR.
Regularly when doing anything that touches online. And even stuff that doesn't touch "online", these days, normally involves trophies that you can cheat your way to getting.
I'll agree that if it was ONLY trophies? Sure you might have an argument... but this obviously isn't only about that one thing.
Let me ask this... if trophies are low key "no one cares" (and that's not the case... plenty of people go out of their way to "100%" games and care about those stupid trophies) then what's the solution to allow "bootleg" controllers for only those people? how many people fall into that category? 25%? 15%? 5? 1? That's a low % of people to support a fragmented market - which is what MS would have to do - support a more fragmented market.
I think it's just too simplistic to say "M$ Evil and only wants money and I play online so I'm the only one that matters".
Supporting "grey market" means a more complicated product to support and that complication isn't going to be worth it for such a small subset of players.
PC gaming is loaded with tons of cheaters despite rootkit level anticheat systems. Having locked down hardware ecosystems reduces the rate of cheating, I've had far fewer times of running into cheaters on console games than on PC games.
I'm just speaking to the idea of PC gaming has worked around cheaters, as if its a solved problem. PC gaming has such a massive cheating problem games are resorting to rootkit-like anticheat systems and yet there's still tons of cheaters out there. It is precisely because there's so much freedom out of the box on a PC that cheating flourishes there.
Blocking controllers isn't a rootkit, I agree. But acting like PC gaming has somehow solved cheating without needing restrictions on input devices and the like is disingenuous.
Blocking controllers makes the cost to have a hacked controller higher. It takes more effort to make a useful hacked controller, they have to source already built controllers and tear them apart, etc. Higher costs means it will be less likely to have people using hacked controllers. If you make the ownership of hacked controllers lower, you reduce the rate of cheating on the platform.
Using cheats on a lot of PC games can be free. If there was some magic that made the cost to install a cheat at least $100 do you think the rate of cheating will be lower, higher, or the same?
The goal isn't to eliminate all cheating, that's impossible. The goal is to reduce the rate of cheating.
Microsoft's only motivation for anything is the maximisation of shareholder value.
There are things we in society don't allow corporations to do in their pursuit of profit. We codify those things in law. This thing they want to do is one of them.
"only" is a strong word and obviously not true. Mainly? Sure... but only? a company with thousands of employees "only" wants one thing?
And saying it's illegal is a bit too strong as well. Maybe in the EU but even then? The EU just made a decade of things obsolete when forcing Apple to switch to USB-C so saying "companies can't do that because illegal" obviously isn't true.
And what is illegal in EU is legal in America or vice versa... or brazil... or China... so saying "society doesn't allow" is too simplistic on that level as well.
In America it's illegal to break DRM. Companies like Apple and Nintendo do stuff so that you can't run custom code or use unauthorized attachments/parts/etc. if you break the DRM you can get sued as a company that provides that service.
And you haven't address the fact that MS, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, etc all have to have stable trustworthy platforms for gaming - that goes beyond "they only want money"- sure, they want money but part of getting that is having platforms people want to use. That they trust. That makes cheating harder and provides a level playing field.
Take a step back and realize that "greedy" companies aren't as simplistic as you want to make them out to be and even if they are "greedy"? They do have valid reasons to do shit like this.
Employees will want many different things and have many differing systems of morals of different strengths including some being totally amoral.
Microsoft is an organisation focused on maximisation of shareholder value. Literally anything they do contrary to that gets them sued for securities fraud. Any employee who morally objects to any action taken by the company can suck it up, resign or commit sabotage for which they will be fired if found out.
Microsoft management have to be ready to defend any and every action as being at the very least not detrimental to shareholder value in court.
At that point I don't give a flying fig what excuse they are using. Neither should the law when it comes to wanton destruction of property. Property rights are a thing!