It’s the sign of good times ahead as keyboard and mouse support are coming soon to Xbox One…
Microsoft has been ensuring fans that the Xbox One will eventually have support for keyboard and a mouse as many asked Xbox boss, Phil Spencer, whether players would be able to stream games from a Windows 10 device to the Xbox One.
And this was two years ago…
Recently at a PAX West panel, Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Gaming Mike Ybarra revealed that the first batch of Xbox One games to support these peripherals as the company have an idea on how to manage the support.
In an interview on Windows Central, Ybarra has stated that there’s plenty of anxiety around the support with many stating that keyboard and mouse users will have the upper hand over controller users.
Keyboard and mouse support is definitely coming. We have to be very smart in how we do that. We’ll leave it a lot up to developer choice. A lot of people tweet me and say “you can’t do this because of fairness,” and we understand that. We run two platforms; the Xbox platform, and the Windows platform.
And so, when we bring keyboard and mouse, we’ll coach developers and say “look, you’ve got to think about your multiplayer pools, if you have a competitive game, people are probably going to want the choice to say I’ll play with other keyboard and mouse people or I’ll play only with controller people, or that I’ll play with any of those.
So you’ll see our first games supporting keyboard and mouse soon, I can’t announce what that is, but soon. And based on developer interest, they’ll choose to do keyboard and mouse, or not!”
Most of the concerns come from competitive shooter players who worry that PC gamers have an edge over console gamers as they can turn rapidly without losing aim whereas with the controller, one does turn rapidly by increasing the joystick speed but you will lose accuracy.
The support also poses more problems with multiplayer functionality. If a multiplayer game were split up between keyboard-and-mouse and controller, this could reduce matchmaking speeds and cuts up player pools. But Ybarra stated that it will be “up to developer choice” whether they want to implement the support or not.
Microsoft has been testing out support on Gears of War 4 due to the cross-play support between Xbox One and Windows 10 platforms and Minecraft’s “Better Together” beta already supports keyboard and mouse input partially due to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) APIs across all Windows 10 devices. Xbox One gamers can decide whether they want to play alongside PC gamers.
Do you want to see keyboard and mouse support for Xbox One? Let us know in the comments section below or follow Xbox Players SA on Facebook and Twitter.
