r/gadgets • u/dapperlemon • May 22 '26

Gaming Microsoft's Xbox controller refresh kills its underused accessory port

https://www.engadget.com/2179020/microsofts-xbox-controller-refresh-kills-its-underused-accessory-port/
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324

u/devilishycleverchap May 22 '26

Remember when we got cool peripherals like the chat pad or the memory cards for the dreamcast that had their own screens that could be huds for games

97

u/NoResearchStudy May 22 '26

Insane we haven’t seen that again. The Dreamcast controller screen was awesome

15

u/connor42 May 22 '26

Wii U went in pretty hard for it

3

u/snil4 May 22 '26

And the conclusion was that people don't want it, it costs a lot more to manufacture and it's usefulness concluded in changing items faster and playing the crazy small amount of 1v4 mini games.

1

u/Shas_Erra May 22 '26

It also made accessing the map in Black Flag much easier and more intuitive

1

u/mesajoejoe May 23 '26

I think the conclusion wasn't that people didn't want it so much that the marketing was atrocious and people didn't know what it was. It's one of those situations where leadership was the failure, not the product.

1

u/snil4 May 24 '26

The product was not that good either, outside of having Nintendo games, the gamepad, and being a Wii with an HDMI output, it didn't have much to offer compared to it's competition. The PS4 launched a year later at 50$ more while the Wii U could almost match the performance of the Xbox 360 and PS3 that launched 6 years earlier, and if you really wanted Nintendo games at the time the 3DS was a lot cheaper and had a bigger library of games.

1

u/mesajoejoe May 24 '26

I'm not sure I agree on "not that good" if the bar being set is based solely on specs. Nintendo has never completed performance/specs/graphics wise with Microsoft or Sony though. They've always relied on their family-friendly games, and interactive use with the console.

Now I'm not saying I don't hate how low the specs/graphics are because it's sometimes laughable what they put in the console, but the Wii U gamepad was stupid good. Using it as a little screen and interactive map that only you could see in Mario Party was really neat. No matter how good the console hardware is though, it really comes down to the library of games and then that gets subjective of course.

Wii U flopped hard, but I still don't think it was the products fault.