This is so ridiculous.

1. I, personally, want discs - or at least real ownership - of games to continue. In the past I bought almost all my games used.
2. That doesn’t matter. Most people - even those who know the current trade-offs - would rather ‘buy’ digital games. Physical sales are a tiny fraction of game sales. With a purely financial head on: it’s going to cost Sony more to continue having them than to stop production. You can’t fight it (or, at least, the fight is unwinnable).

The only winnable fight here - and I still think it’s a long shot - is convincing governments to legislate to allow download of and resale of digital purchases.

They’re trying to spin the studio off without shutting it down. This allows them to talk about their ongoing/future work publicly.

Honestly, they need to do this. It can’t be possible to manage that many studios from the top of the Xbox organization. And, without market pressure as a clear feedback mechanism, it’s got to be difficult for the managers of the studios too.

The original sin here was buying so many and trying to become some game-production monopoly. The whole plan was crazy.

Hopefully this is good for the industry long-term. I’d love to see a bunch of independent studios pop up run by the people Microsoft temporarily ingested.

To be clear, this is terrible for the people involved, and it is all Microsoft’s fault (or, at least, Phil Spencer era Xbox’s fault - never understood why he was so respected inside or outside of Microsoft when he kept making one surely-obviously-bad decision after another). But it was surely inevitable.

the masses don’t complain about good games

Citation needed. Are there any games that haven’t generated online backlash?

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Do you still have to buy some tier of gamepass to be able to play multiplayer games that you own online?

Ugh, you’re right, Way to undermine my own point! There are no official third party wireless controllers.

8BitDo do make licensed controllers that work with Xbox though - for example: https://www.8bitdo.com/pro2-wired-controller-for-xbox/ and https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/ultimate-wired-controller-for-xbox

[Edit: and there are a bunch of wired third party controllers on Microsoft’s store from other manufacturers: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories?xr=shellnav]

8bitdo (and the other major 3rd party controller makers) have a license. Their controllers are even advertised on Microsoft’s site - e.g. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/mobile-gaming/sn30-pro

[Edit: @ArugulaZ@kbin.social points out correctly that this controller does not with with Xbox - it’s for mobile. Oops. There are some that do though - see later replies!]

Yes, there’s a proprietary authentication mechanism. It’s been used in all controllers from the Xbox One, released in 2013, onward. At the moment, at least publicly, it remains uncracked. That’s actually quite impressive!

I think a lot of people are interpreting this news to mean that all third party Xbox controllers will stop working. Controllers from the likes of PowerA, Razer or 8bitdo. But they will still work. They are licensed by Microsoft and contain their proprietary authentication processors.

Some third party accessories like the Cronos Zen allow other controllers (Joysticks, wheels, PC gamepads, Playstation controllers etc.) to work with Xbox - and also often contain ‘cheat’ mechanisms (like automatic direction input to compensate for gun recoil in shooters). They require you to connect an authentic Xbox controller to them and hijack communication to do ‘authentication’ via the authentic controller. Perhaps Microsoft has worked out a way to detect this?

Lastly, there are some cheap third party controllers, often from Chinese manufacturers, that seem, at the moment, to ‘just work’ without being licensed by Microsoft. General online consensus seems to be that they’re using recycled authentication chips - but perhaps some contain cracked copies of the algorithm and Microsoft has figured out a way to tell?

It’s these last two categories that Microsoft is presumably cracking down on.