Skittles
He ruins the fun.
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2011
- Messages
- 983
They use the same USB ports, so why don't Microsoft and Sony just allow you to plug them in? Does it cost more?Sure, consoles are capable of more than they've been used for. The charge (by people who aren't graphics tards) that they've channeled game design is not based on limitations on what they're possibly able to do; it has more to do with how they're actually used and designed for. If most people attached consoles to monitors, keyboards, and mouses, designing for them wouldn't be too much different for PCs. But people don't, so devs design accordingly and that means they generally shy away from games/design choices that require more complex input options and lots of text when they have consoles in mind.eh to fix the problem of input, the devs can just allow you to plug in a Mouse + keyboard to play a game.
Why don't they? I don't know their specific reasoning--I'm not sure it's a question either company has ever publicly addressed and am interested in hearing someone else chime in. The cynical side of me wants to believe it's because forcing people to buy their peripherals or at least licensed peripherals is more profitable. More charitably, I would guess the following are potential sources of concern: how to deliver drivers (particularly in a pre-always online console era) and support their development for a closed system; how to handle customers navigating compatibility issues; potentially fracturing your market (operating under the assumption that you want everyone buying your sold-at-a-loss console to be a potential buyer of every game you release); causing issues with multiplayer balance in games where there are performance differences between players with different inputs. And bear in mind that part of the appeal of consoles is not having to deal with headaches like updating drivers, doing research on compatibility, having to develop a lot of system literacy, etc. They're mostly supposed to be take it out of the box, plug it in, and play. If there isn't a lot of demand, why even do the work of figuring out how much of an obstacle each of these presents? It's not even a "sexy" feature like motion control or VR.
Again, I'm only speculating; your guess is as good as mine. I think it's telling that Microsoft's early signals about (Direct)Xboxes indicated that they might have been interested in taking a more laissez-faire approach, but that's not what they ultimately produced. I doubt that shift was due to whimsy.