They are most definitely doing this to combat cheaters. I tried out Cronus + KBM on my friend's Xbox S and it was comical. I had aim assist, no recoil and a keyboard and mouse. I was running 100:3 K:D on COD:MW2. If you don't think cheating is a big part of the reason you've never played console games competitively.
That's the problem though: pampering to competitive gamers ruins the experience for the vast majority of people, who just want to, you know, enjoy a game. Unfortunately, competitive gamers are the only ones that matter - they're the cash cows of this part of the industry, which now focuses on creating as many such players as they can, and milking them for all they're worth.
Consider how cheating was handled back before AAA games turned into videogame equivalent of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies: if you were found cheating, you were booted off the server, period. There was no matchmaking bullshit, the games weren't nudging or limiting you to play on the ladder, against global ranking. Instead, you had local and international servers, public and private; you had neighbourhood servers, and servers run by groups of friends, and themed servers, etc. - in other words, servers were communities. As diverse and rich as human communities can be. And they handled cheating in ways communities do it.
On smaller / local servers, people wouldn't cheat because the community extended past the game to other on-line places, and/or to meatspace. Everyone was friends with each other, and being a cheating asshole is a fast way to lose your friends. Scaling up, you had all the mechanisms one also saw on discussion boards: some servers had owner or moderators ban anyone they didn't like; others voted. It was nicely self-regulating: servers weren't sticky, so being banned as false positive (or out of spite) didn't hurt. People didn't like power-tripping server operators? They'd switch over to a new server, run by someone saner.
Were there still cheaters? Yes. Assholes and griefers happened. But without a single global ranking to compete for, cheating was mostly self-defeating: there was no reward, no incentive, and you'd be just ruining the fun for yourself.
Yes, cheating is kind of a proxy reason why I don't enjoy multiplayer games. But the real reason is this: modern games feel like suddenly all the little soccer leagues were required to follow all the FIFA rules, were allowed only to play registered games, only to use pitches and equipment and balls and clothes that are certifiably up to spec, regularly audited - all because it might happen that our ad-hoc team of Sunday players would one day be visited by a World Cup team, and it would suck if we had an unfair advantage.
It's just ruining the game for everyone, for the sake of a small group of people running a racket.
Wow you've captured well the feelings I have looking at modern gaming very well. In the 2000s I played on servers and chatted with people for weeks, over time we learnt how each other played and formed cooperative teams and had our own in jokes. Kind of like HN. Your description of "modern gaming" to get up a global ladder highlights the near equivalence of social media firms, facebook etc. with their likes, fllowers and doom scrolling. It makes me slightly sad if kids don't have those communities today.
This reminds me of Wildstar. The MMO was intentionally dedicated to hardcore players, making progression nearly impossible for casuals. They were pretty smug about it as I recall. It eventually died, as there weren't enough players paying micro-transactions to keep the servers online.
It declined remarkably quickly on release, as was completely predictable. Unfortunately, it had multiple problems, so difficulty fetishists could always point to the other problems.
Wildstar was the game that made me realize I was done with MMOs. Not only was I not really looking forward to the attunement flowchart (I love raiding but jeeze) but around level 12 I realized I didn't want to play the game you have to play before you can play the game. I've come to really appreciate round-based lobby games since then.
I think my wife would love to explore the game again, and I think we could maybe tune some dungeons so they're doable by just two players, but we're parents now and some things are just not possible anymore.
I don’t understand the relevance of this. Are you saying that aggressively targeting cheaters is pampering to wannabe pros or that not aggressively targeting them is pampering wannabe pros?
Another thing that has changed in FPS land is game modes making cheaters WAY more frustrating. It used to be that you get into a lobby, see someone cheating, and could leave and find a new lobby right away. Now with the extremely popular battle royale modes, you don’t encounter the cheater until 20 minutes into a match — via dying in a game mode where dying is “expensive.”
I'm saying is that it's a problem companies created themselves, and are subjecting customers to increasingly dystopian measures in a futile attempt to manage it.
Pro gaming and casual gaming don't mix well. Cheating is a self-solving (or at least self-regulating) problem if you let people freely associate and host games. Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking. It still can be solved in context of pro-gaming, but it requires some invasive means.
The right approach would be to treat casual and pro gaming as separate experiences. Casual players play casually without invasive anti-cheating measures; pro players sign up for the league, which comes with extra restrictions. This is exactly how it used to work in the past, and exactly how any non-computer competition works: casuals and pro players may be playing the same game, but their goals are different, and so the rules and experience is different too.
Unfortunately, as it always happened, the industry decided to do the exact opposite of the right thing, and is now forcing all players to play by the competitive pro-gaming rules. With the game designed around pro gaming, causal players no longer have means to host and moderate their own servers in a social fashion, thus losing the natural, non-invasive method of combating cheaters. The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer. As a result, casual players (which tend to be the majority) become exposed to competitive cheaters, which obviously makes the game extremely frustrating for the former. And to mitigate that, companies are employing invasive anti-cheating methods - methods that make sense when dealing with clubs and official matches, but are plain abusive and dystopian when employed remotely at scale.
Again, the right way to solve cheating is to keep casual gaming and pro gaming entirely separate - the same way playing soccer with your friends is an entirely separate activity from playing it professionally in a local team. Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
Several of the assumptions in your post are flawed, which undermines your whole argument.
> Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking
This is untrue, cheating was until recently a huge problem for team fortress 2 which hasn't been competitive for years.
See also the huge cheating problems in the CoD games from the Xbox 360 era, which was before they were competitive outside of small, grassroots tournaments.
> The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer
Players overwhelmingly do not prefer server browsing. Games have consolidated on the matchmaking model because any game without it is dead on arrival.
The biggest example of a game with a foot still in both worlds is Counterstrike, where the overwhelming use of custom servers is for external matchmaking services with stricter anti cheat than Valves VAC.
> Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games. Check out a recent financial report from ActiBlizzard and see how much money they make from competitive games like Overwatch and CoD compared to their mobile sub company, King.
Pro circuits and pro game modes are advertising expenses, not revenue or profit centers. Arguably the biggest pro game in the world, Counterstrike, makes the vast ,majority of it's money selling lootboxes and taking a cut on skin trades.
> Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games.
This is actually very, very true. Most esports departments are not incredibly profitable (I actually worked for one of the biggest esports gaming companies for a long time and it was a constant source of friction how much money was spent on esports versus the return on it).
At the end of the day, cheating is a dopamine hit: killing the whole lobby in 2-seconds by holding down a button makes people feel good and you can't fight against that without some pretty drastic measures.
So I agree with the overall thrust of your argument here in that I far preferred the world of casual servers you could hop on with your friends, make goofy rules, ban whoever you wanted, etc., and I see how dissolving that into shared servers with automated matchmaking makes certain anti-cheat measures infeasible.
What I’m not sure of is to what degree the new shared servers/auto-matchmaking pattern is due to catering to competitive gamers? Is that really the reason?
(I legitimately have no idea so I’m curious how you’ve come to this conclusion)
The vast majority of players are likely using the stock controllers or controllers they picked up at a normal store stocking pretty much only OEM or approved 3rd party controllers.
The vast majority of players will never know this is a thing.
If they were trying to combat cheaters, they wouldn't have released an official controller that allows generic, 3rd party, unauthenticated inputs: the Xbox Adaptive Controller.
It would be pretty trivial to hook up a Pi Pico through the jacks and USB ports to be able to make a KBM adapter like that. There just hasn't been a point making such a device when the xim/cronus works fine.
"Pretty trivial" but only for the small percentage of people that are tech minded like that and who can be bothered; it's not an issue, not compared to laypeople being able to buy an off the shelf ready to use product.
Yes, and once a company like xim makes one, they can sell it and laypeople will buy it off the shelves. This method doesn't require any internal modifications or anything, that's the whole point of the adaptive controller.
The creators of the xim will want to make a new product to sell if their old one no longer works. It might even be possible with a software update.
Those off the shelf ready to use cheating products will still be there, they are just going to use a modified xbox controller instead of a third-party one because that's what microsoft allows.
The difference is Microsoft will now get more money out of the cheating products than before, not sure that sounds the right incentive but that's what is going to happen.
If this ban affects cheaters at all (after the next firmware update), the next Chronus could very well be a little box with a bunch of colour coded wires that you plug into an Xbox accessibility controller. All the cheater logic ("no recoil", mouse like precision on the analog sticks) would still work perfectly.
How is cheating in video games hurting society?
I would assume it drives people off playing multiplayer games, but I fail to see how this would be bad for society.
Possibly, I think the math on number of people that currently purchase controllers that will be blocked in the future is a very small amount of money compared to the possibility of losing that revenue to other gaming sources if that is the reason.
"Preserving console experience" really feels like corporatespeak to say "cheaters" without saying the devices in question (because then it raises visibility to those devices).
I think the "doing this for money" is the people who are currently not gaming due to rampant cheating in games like R6S, Apex, COD, etc.
That's a convenient metric. Or rather, the lack of it. My common sense tells me there are significantly more people using third party controllers than there are cheaters, though.
I think the metric is blocked controllers, which is a small subset of 3rd party controllers. So far the most common people complaining about this change is cronus and xim users not legit players.
Most 3rd party controllers that are being sold online are still compatible afaict.
I don't think it has affected xim or cronus at all. They use official first party Xbox controllers to handle authentication, and MITM them to inject inputs.
Instead the big one affected has been Brooks, who make very popular boards for custom fighting game controllers.
they obviously care about money and selling periphials is money... but so is selling consoles.
If they can't control the cheaters in some fashion (losing battle and all that) then they will sell less consoles because why would people pay for that? (unless you're a cheater paying for it but that's besides the point).
The problem you have is that you think there's only one answer to this and the answers is the want to stop the cheaters AND they want money because cheaters affect both.
If the goal was really to stop cheater, they'd provide an API in their XDA to let game developers reject unauthorized controllers. That way, ranked matches could take advantage of this to make competitive games more fair. If people want to have more fun with cheats in a single player game using an unapproved third-party controller, they should be able to do so!
