Microsoft Suddenly Decides To Prevent Third Party Accessories From Working On Xbox
from the surprise! dept
Welcome to the modern world, where the thing you bought that worked a particular way at the time you purchased it isn’t actually fully owned you, which means the thing you bought could work totally differently tomorrow! This dystopia for consumers was perhaps most famously demonstrated to exist when Sony famously removed the ability to install other operating systems on its PlayStation 3 years and years ago, breaking functionality that some percentage of buyers specifically wanted at the time of purchase. Once that happened, a billion other examples came to be, especially in the technology space.
And now we’ve come somewhat full circle, not all the way back to Sony, but this time to Microsoft. It appears that the company recently updated its Xbox systems recently such that the consoles suddenly don’t allow third part peripherals, which previously worked just fine.
The upcoming change was first reported last week over on WindowsCentral. An Xbox One user reported getting an 0x82d60002 error code when trying to use her existing off-brand Xbox controller. “A connected accessory is not authorized,” a console warning read. “Using unauthorized accessories compromises your gaming experience. For this reason, the unauthorized accessory will be blocked from use on 11/12/2023.”
A similar warning was reported by accessory maker Brook Gaming, which specializes in fighting boards and steering wheel adapters. “Recently, we have received player feedback concerning these products when used on Xbox consoles (the latest OS version 10.0.25398.2266 released on 10/16) during online gameplay,” the company tweeted on October 20. “We deeply regret any inconvenience this may cause you.”
So, what’s happening here? Well, it could be any number of things. Occam’s Razor would probably suggest that the least complicated answer is that Microsoft wants to make more money selling its own peripherals, exactly like Sony does by locking down peripherals on its PlayStation consoles. If you want something slightly more complicated than that, it could also be that Microsoft is doing this as a way to disallow third-party controllers and peripherals that use adapters which allow for cheating in online games. Microsoft even hinted as much in a statement it made after some backlash began.
A spokesperson for Microsoft confirmed the ban will soon go into effect and said it’s for “performance, security, and safety.” “Microsoft and other licensed Xbox hardware partners’ accessories are designed and manufactured with quality standards for performance, security, and safety,” they wrote in a statement. “Unauthorized accessories can compromise the gaming experience on Xbox consoles (Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S.) Players may receive a pop-up warning that their accessory is unauthorized. Eventually, the unauthorized accessory will be blocked from use to preserve the console gaming experience.”
There are a couple of problems here. First and foremost is what we discussed in the opening: third-party peripherals worked just fine a couple of weeks ago and now they suddenly don’t. I’m sure Microsoft will point to some kind of language, vague or otherwise, buried in the terms of service. Regardless, the precedence was set that these peripherals would work and then Microsoft remotely took that away from consoles sitting in people’s living rooms after the money was spent. Legal or not, it’s certainly a pernicious and callous way to treat your customers.
And then there’s what I assume are the unintended consequences, such as gaming tournaments that have found 3rd party peripherals quite useful.
“Heyo [Phil Spencer, Xbox, Matt Booty] This is essentially a death sentence for local fighting game events that run on Xbox, much less, others that can only afford one arcade stick,” fighting game content creator and expert Maximilian Dood tweeted on October 29 as the news spread. “The Brookgamingfans converters are not cheat devices. They’re a huge boon to the FGC. Please reconsider!”
I doubt Microsoft will reconsider anything at all. The company has seemed hell bent on moving in the direction of exerting more control over all things Xbox, from gobbling up studios and bringing longstanding franchises in as Microsoft exclusives to now locking down peripherals.
Customers that already paid for the hardware be damned, I suppose.
Filed Under: 3rd party accessories, accessories, xbox
Companies: microsoft
Comments on “Microsoft Suddenly Decides To Prevent Third Party Accessories From Working On Xbox”
Never thought I’d see Max Dood cited on Techdirt. 😄
Microsoft: You’re having a problem? Oh Gee, that’s too bad.
(South Park Cable Guys gif goes here)
See, this is why I prefer to game on PC. Which is where literally all of Microsoft’s games are nowadays anyway, so I consider buying an Xbox to be pointless.
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Not Halo 5.
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Considering I’ve heard Halo 5’s campaign is a mess and I don’t play much Halo multiplayer, I’d say that’s not a huge loss. A bit baffling, though, considering the rest of the series is on PC now as of the MCC and Infinite, and last I checked Halo 5 Forge is on PC as well as a standalone thing??
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Where literally all of Microsoft’s games are nowadays*
*that are actually worth playing (read: not Halo 5)
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When Windows is increasingly becoming more and more hostile and enshittified, why exactly do you have faith in the other big proprietary product owned by Microsoft? What would stop them from doing the same thing?
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Who said I had faith in Windows? There’s still Linux, and considering Valve (the owner of THE largest PC storefront) has been actively investing in Linux through Steam OS and Proton as an active hedge against the enshittification of Windows and is easily in a position to lock Windows users out of Steam if they so desired to screw over Microsoft, Windows is no longer the only viable option for the vast majority of games now.
And I have many issues with the Epic Games Store (and Epic’s self-righteous positioning of itself as a champion of the little guy), but Epic is equally suspicious of Microsoft, considering Tim Sweeney’s comments on the matter. Both Valve and Epic (who has basically one of the most popular F2P games on the market) both have Microsoft over a barrel. Microsoft are in literally no position to enshittify Windows further that are detrimental to PC gamers without Valve and Epic kicking up a massive fuss about it and highlighting it to hundreds of millions of users. And worst comes to worst, Linux is right there.
I imagine Microsoft is still kicking itself to this day for not doing what Steam did first.
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*further in ways that are detrimental to PC gamers
Whoops, that goof slipped through.
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“literally all of Microsoft’s games are nowadays”… on Linux? Is that true?
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I don’t even feel the need to put up with Windows for gaming these days. Ubuntus version of steam has built in Windows emulation now. It works automatically once you enable it and you just launch games as normal.
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Not everything that’s on Xbox, but sure all 1st party games.
Good for you. Fortunately, the other options are there for people who don’t.
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Buy a PC
Unless you bought it years ago you would have to be very, very regarded to buy an Xbox now.
They’re trying so hard to make Xbox mainstream like it was in the 360 glory days but they’re tripping over their own ineptitude. Many such cases!
And what about 3rd party peripherals that disabled people use? Wouldn’t this count as disability discrimination?
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The only disability that Microsoft officially recognize is low-IQ. Beyond that, you’ve only got a shiny brick to play with.
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The only reason they choose to recognize low IQ as a disability is because it is ignorance and stupidity that leads people to buying an Xbox.
Re: A PR black eye just waiting to land
I’m not sure if it would reach the point of active discrimination cutting off all third party controllers and also happening to hit those used by people with disabilities but if anything could get them to quickly back off and rethink this move ‘Microsoft leaves disabled players in the dust after barring use of third-party controllers that allowed them to play along with others’ would probably do the trick.
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I bet there’s a few officially licensed products that they will point to in that case. Or even their own Xbox Adaptive Controller.
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The story is unauthorised peripherals. There’s been a lot of FUD about it being any 3rd party controllers, but from what I see it’s not going to affect those that work with MS.
Knowing Microsoft history in devices and accessories, Occam’s Razor would suggest a bug (like for some cheap Chinese brands), certainly from the same lazy guy who pretended that Kinect was mandatory to use an Xbox.
Yep, that exactly what I’m asking at the shop when I want to buy a new gamepad.
That f*cking sucks for anyone who hates analog drift
Vendor lock-in, hardware edition.
So, does a controller that has turbo mode (auto-press button repeatedly) is considered cheating?
What about the worse one, analog drift? Is it cheating to use a 3rd party controller that is drift-proof?
Seriously. Imagine Apple forcing iphone owners to use only approved lightning charging cables to charge their phones. They’re notorious for fraying terminals.
Like they seriously want us to use inferior products.
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Probably more shake-down than lock-in. I worked at a software company that wanted iPod compatibilty, back when those were popular. iPods wouldn’t talk to “unauthenticated” systems. So we’d get authentication chips from somewhere (desoldered from cheap accessories I think) and we had a person who could wire them up to connect to USB for our testing lab.
The only “security” relevance was to Apple’s financial security, because they’d get a bit of money from everyone who manufactured a compatible product. Basically the same thing as Nintendo’s 10NES chip, decades earlier, and cracked in almost the same way. And despite the claims of “quality”, all these companies including Microsoft have approved their fair share of shit.
Analog drift is not relevant to Microsoft’s bottom line, so they won’t actually prevent you from fixing it. That is, the approved products won’t have to detect unauthorized joysticks or other tampering. If you want to buy an official controller and mod it to be less shitty, this won’t stop you at all. People are doing it, and it’s said that popular cheats work similarly (instead of sending USB packets, you remove the buttons and sticks and solder new connections in their place).
For all the people here getting cocky here about using PCs, I guess you’ve got some cheap controllers coming to your local thrift stores. They’re not bad for emulator use.
Re: Re: Thank god for that then
Microsoft, call THAT cheating. Lockdown the individual parts of the controller? Sure people can just clamp their controller to some object and have another object doing the button press/analog stick movement for you (akin to that Star Wars: Battlefront 2 rubber band on the analog sticks, which some call that cheating)
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Perhaps future controllers will be boxes into which one has to put one’s hands—with no room for anything else, and being watched by a Kinect (there’s gotta a warehouse or two full of those, right?).
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If Nintendo’s behavior in the 1980s is any indication: yes, until Microsoft releases an official controller with that feature; then, no.
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If the game has you competing with players who don’t have that functionality but pressing the button quickly is how you beat the other players, then… yes?
Microsoft mantra:
Greed = profit.
More profit = more greed.
Rinse and repeat endelessly.
Implementation Problems
So, one thing I thought of when this came out is… what happens when whatever licensing agreement the manufacturer has expires? Do those controllers suddenly stop working?
That said, there are implementation questions:
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The other problem is that USB was never designed with security in mind (that’s why we have things like the rubber ducky: USB dongles pretending to be keyboards even though, physically, they aren’t). from a security standpoint, I genuinely don’t see how MS can make this work. USB provides information to the system when a device is connected, and maybe MS has some special command protocol that they use over top the USB layer to authenticate the controller, but USB itself has no security mechanisms — it’s not supposed to have such a thing to begin with. The problem with trying to make something like this work is that it’s trivial to figure out the protocol. All you have to do is sniff it, and with USB that’s…. Erm, rather easy. I could easily see someone breaking this quite trivially: have an “authorized” game controller connected to a spoofer pass-through device, which just monitors the data sent and nothing else, then forwards the raw packets to the XBox. Something like that would only cost at most $100 to build, and that’s being overly cynical. And I speak as someone who’s written a hobby OS.
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Neither was the internet, but we added it. Since USB also allows arbitrary byte streams, we could add it just as easily. No big deal, but as has been written elsewhere, security is a smokescreen justification rather than a real goal.
You could sniff network traffic too, but it wouldn’t help you break HTTPS. With a half-decent protocol, you’re looking at modifying traffic and hoping the implementors fucked up. Otherwise, it’s fuming nitric acid and the other accoutrements of the hardware hacker.
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The only security in mind with lock downs like this is the security of the companies profits.
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If it’s anything like other such products, the official controllers will contain some authentication chip supplied by Microsoft… and the unofficial ones probably won’t, unless they scrounge them up from discarded products or other “gray-market” sources.
It’s just a way for Microsoft to get some per-accessory income. Don’t take their comments at face-value. Look to things like smartcards and hardware security modules to see what security would actually look like. The controller might, for example, have a tamper-proof mesh that would break upon opening the controller, at which point it would never work again. More simply, maybe an SRAM containing a secret key, powered by a battery on the other half of the controller (via a cable that’d have to be disconnected to open the thing; and of course the controller would “self-destruct” eventually, though my Zelda cartridge continues to work after three and a half decades).
The Xbox protocol is already non-standard, and USB has always had provisions for “alternate settings”. It’d be no big deal to talk some secret protocol to an Xbox and a normal protocol to a PC. Or Microsoft could release a Windows driver—though that’d only make it easier to crack, and for now they don’t seem to mind people using Xbox controllers with non-Microsoft hosts. That also means the authentication does not have to be mutual.
Ever heard of the Claw controller-Grip?
There are some people out there with supernatural controller abilites. Grips you can’t imagine, in speeds you can only dream of and remember so many little steps to quickly beat games with style. It is my favorite part of watching people play games. This mandate will eventually be bypassed (many ways) and they will only lose out on licensing royalties and could potentially end up with an inferior product becoming complacent on advances.
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Well, yeah, but in quantity? 10NES was bypassed too, but Nintendo probably collected revenue from upward of 99% of NES cartridges—it was “good enough” to keep the unofficial ones underground. (Nintendo may well have lost out on licensing revenue, overall, because of some pretty serious ROM shortages in the official production lines.) Printer-ink lockout chips mostly remain uncracked.
Fucking post-purchase software TPM “upgrade”. Fake security. Screw you, Microsoft.
I haven’t seen such a thing since Sony pulled Linux support from the PS2…
The funny thing is, the xbox controllers designed for “cheating” supposedly require an official controller to pass through the security challenge/response stuff to, and are therefore unaffected by this.
cycle
-little guy actually gives customers the functionality that customers want in order to gain popularity/market share
-little guy becomes the big/bigger guy in the market
-little guy removes any functionality that it thinks will hurt their bottom line
-new little guy enters the ring
-repeat
This is why we have hackers/modders.
I bought a series x looking forward to emulation, but that window is closing too. Whoever has the better GTA6 will probably get my future $$$.
Careful what you wish for...
The knuckleheads that demanded a level playing field can’t complain when they’re getting what they want.
That may be MS’s justification but I’m skeptical it’s the real reason. I don’t know how significant an impact this will really have on hardware-based cheating, given that:
They may say it’s about cheating, but I think it’s about cheating in the same way that printer manufacturers locking out competitors’ ink cartridges is about security: a company giving a lame excuse about how its anticompetitive money grab is good for consumers, actually.
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That could be detected, at least (the accessibility controller almost certainly has its own USB product identifier, and I assume the games can see it; it would be a bit of a red flag for all the top players to be “disabled”).
Your point would be better made by noting that they’re not even trying, or talking about ever trying. Microsoft could, for example, announce that only tamper-resistant controllers will be approved after 2024. While such a thing would not be foolproof, the number of people with experience hacking well-designed tamper-resistant hardware is limited and they probably don’t work cheaply.
It’s like Microsoft and Sony really want people to switch back to PC gaming lately.
garbage
i predict a mass flood of x-box garbage hitting goodwill!
all this. just in time for christmas!
now where did i put that emulator????
it’s for “performance, security, and safety.”
Which is why we haven’t done anything about it during the entire lifecycle of the product until now.
Just because this will land right before the holiday shopping season is no reason to think this is just us trying to claw a few more pennies out of our users to help defray the cost of blizzard.
Well, I suppose disabling people’s controllers won’t compromise their gaming experience. No gamer has ever complained about the experience of having a controller that doesn’t work.
“Welcome to the modern world, where the thing you bought that worked a particular way at the time you purchased it isn’t actually fully owned [by] you, which means the thing you bought could work totally differently tomorrow!”
And this is why I’m still running Windows 7. Sure, it’s been unsupported for over a decade, but at least it doesn’t have to always be online just to work, meaning Micro$h!t can’t arbitrarily stop it working the way I need it to as a result.
Re: Windows 7 support
Windows 7 Extended Support ended on January 14, 2020, three years ago. ‘Security updates were available for the operating system until January 10, 2023,’ which is recent.
Google Chrome ended its support for Windows 7 and 8/8.1 with v. 109.0.5414 (incl.), which version was released on 10 January 2023. This release of Chrome is still fairly modern, and will remain so for those that want to continue using it.
Firefox still supports Windows 7/8.1, though with the v. 115 ESR (extended support release) branch. Mainline Firefox is at v. 119.
If you want slightly better security, you might consider Windows 8.1. Its Extended Support ended on 10 January 2023, which is this year. It might still receive some security updates after this date.
So far, consumer Home and Pro versions of Windows 10 will be supported until 14 October 2025, unless Microsoft changes its policy.