The Xbox One gamepad won’t work with your PC at launch. Despite it still connecting with a USB port, Microsoft say “new software has to be written and optimized for the PC” before the peripheral will work with our machines.
They say that it should be ready in 2014.
“New wireless protocol, combined with the ability to work in ‘wired’ mode, and the addition of features like Impulse triggers, means that new software has to be written and optimized for the PC,” Microsoft told Venturebeat.
“There is also some work that we need to do to make sure that existing PC games that support the Xbox 360 controller will work with the Xbox One controller. While it seems trivial, it’s actually quite a bit of dedicated work for all that to be seamless for the user.”
The biggest impact the Xbox 360 has had on the PC is its USB controller.
When Microsoft allowed you to plug it into your computer as easily as the console they hugely increased the number of PC gamers who now owned gamepads. Developers were free to assume players had access to a controlled. Games like Super Meat Boy and Darksiders become so much more possible when controlled with analogue thumbsticks instead of binary keys.
Bad ports gained hugely, too. We were no longer forced to work with the developer’s rudimentary understanding of keyboard mapping. You could just use what they’d set up for the 360’s controls.