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Comment by darknavi | Hacker News Reader

The best time to do this was when the console launched, the second best time is now.

As a MSFT employee in Gaming we get accessibility put front and center in our faces often and even then it can easily be "best effort" or almost ignored if you aren't careful. I am really happy more and more games are getting on board with solid accessibility settings and peripherals that can bring the joy of games to more and more people. Gaming is such a magical medium of entertainment and engagement that everyone should be able to enjoy it.

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Then you block third party accessibility devices... https://www.ign.com/articles/why-xboxs-third-party-accessori...

To be fair there are more and more devices on the market that are made to assist cheaters.[1][2][3] Banning third party controllers will even the playing field for all players of competitive games. Besides Microsoft obviously wants to monopolize their overly expensive controllers. Microsoft themselves have already made Adaptive Controller which isn't too expensive and supports a wide range of external devices. You can think what you want about the ban but you can't frame it as them banning accessibility devices specifically.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...

[2]: https://www.cronusmax.com/

[3]: https://www.consoletuner.com/products/titan-two/

Those cheating devices usually use a first party controller for authentication and the major ones were not affected by the recent changes at all.

On the Playstation side they use remote play to avoid detection. Sony has some old devices they no longer patch that can still be used as remote play clients (PS Vita/TV) which may or may not be impacted if they patched that vector.

Former MSFT gaming intern here. The internal conversations around accessibility are fantastic, you all are killing it.

I'd love it if you also provided a console wide setting for y-axis look inversion : - )

I think that's one of the settings in the console's list of defaults. Though I don't think I've seen a game that reads those yet.

MS only does things if there’s a financial reason and not any sort of altruism. You lose out on sales if your game doesn’t have controller support - through which is the only way many people can play games. Meanwhile there’s “accessibility” in the rest of the company.

Just so I understand this right, you're saying that the only reason Microsoft designs and releases accessible controllers is because they make money off it? I don't think that's right, given how much they have to invest in it and how small the market is.

This sort of simplistic thinking is indicative of a person that’s just…never been part of a much larger whole before? You’re actually giving Microsoft immense credit with your claim that an organisation with such a high head count could converge so highly on reasoning to do something. In reality, in any large organisation, anything that happens, happens almost by happenstance. Someone was sick for that meeting and didn’t get a chance to make a case for their alternative pet project. Someone has a disability that would benefit from using this controller. Someone saw the market value. Blah blah blah.

The way some people talk about tech companies sounds a whole lot like the way that people talk about celebrities. It’s absurd.

It's the same with countries. I've heard conspiracies where the whole of NATO has put Zelensky as a puppet president in Ukraine so they could start a war with Russia for political gain or something like that, I don't remember the conspiracy having a real motif.

All these companies only ever do things for financial reasons. Enabling all people to use your serivce or device or website is a win-win.

Sony doesn't sell the Playstation as an act of charity. They do it to let people give them money for things they enjoy using. Likewise for these types of accessories.

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