It's a typical scenario of trying to solve a hard problem with a solution that ignores a minority community.

Unfortunately, this minority community already has a lot of problems, and no one is going to support this decision outside of the company. Even if someone isn't disabled, they can understand the pain of those who are, and might even become disabled one day. Everyone can empathize.

And all because some people have a slight advantage in certain games? Forget about it. Someone always has an advantage. This was an absolutely idiotic move.

Lots of disabled people are avid gamers. This is a dick move and I hope they realize that.

Watch, they’ll just tell people to get the (very expensive) Adaptive Controller, never mind that won’t actually work for a lot of disabled folks.

I’ve only had one Xbox, a 360, ABC the only reason it didn’t turn into an expensive dust collector was I could get a third post controller that didn’t cause my thumb and fingers to dislocate, like the in the box controller did. Next generation, the decision of Xbox or PS4 was made FOR me by the company that made the controller I used going out of business. Accessibility really can, and does, make a difference in what console people get.

Probably be happier gaming on the PC than Xbox, especially if one wants flexibility to modify things on the system side to work better.

Speaking of which, I'm wondering what kind of impact this will have on the PC controller market. The XBox-style controller kind of became the norm on the PC. But if this does a lot to kill the third-party XBox controller market -- because no XBox players are buying them any more -- then you can't make a controller that sells to both the PC and XBox market. I assume that people on the PC might start using Switch-style or Playstation-style controllers.

I'm also kind of surprised that Microsoft didn't just set a "no online play" flag. As I understand it, the concern is people using nonstandard controllers to get an edge. But as long as there aren't any leaderboards or online play I wouldn't think that third-party controllers would cause a problem. That's not gonna make everyone who's disabled happy, but at least it leaves single-player games alone. Maybe the problem is that some games are already out in the wild -- so won't support such a flag -- and record offline results and upload them when the network comes back or do some sort of other behavior that Microsoft can't readily work around with OS changes.

EDIT: For PC-based game players, this may also be a good time to pick up a secondhand XBox-style third party controller if one wants them, if it's going to create a large mass of people with controllers that can't be used on the XBox that they want to use them on.

goes looking for a list

Yeah. This claims to be a complete list of authorized controllers.

https://www.sportskeeda.com/gaming-tech/a-list-licensed-authorized-third-party-xbox-controllers-accessories

Places like Thrustmaster make some pricey controllers -- the P310 doesn't appear to be on the authorized list, and that's $750. Now, maybe Thrustmaster is eventually gonna go back and go through whatever certification program Microsoft has, or maybe they aren't, but the controller isn't on the list now, and I imagine that some people are just gonna get rid of the things if they start throwing errors.

Microsoft’s current decision is a stark contrast to Xbox’s motto of “When Everybody Plays, We All Win.” To build trust with disabled players by consistently advocating for accessibility and the disabled experience only to then quickly and surprisingly remove the tools that disabled players need is shocking to much of the community.

They really trade the peoples trust like currency huh. It's not shocking but still upsetting

they're banning hitboxes????? jesus christ they really don't want to compete in the FGC huh