Yesterday Microsoft officially revealed the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a new device designed to allow gamers with various disabilities to avoid the obstacles they encounter with traditional controllers.
Speaking with GamesBeat, Head of Xbox division Phil Spencer revealed that it's more than just social goodness as there's a business opportunity there and Microsoft plans to get the Xbox Adaptive Controller to as many people as possible - even millions if there's the demand.
In terms of the business opportunity, we are a platform for content. We think the more people that can play, it creates a good business opportunity. It’s not about the margin on this specific device. People know that in the console business, we sell our console at a loss in order to create sockets for players. That’s traditional. You don’t make money on hardware. You make money on software and services. If you really think about the work that people go through in order to experience the products we build, creating something like this that opens up the games we and others build for our platform to more people is good business for us as well.
There’s a business opportunity to get more people to play, where these two things can really intersect. The opportunity to open up gaming to a constituency that isn’t able to play as easily as you and I can, and the goodness in bringing more people to the platform—that’s a pretty special moment.
We want to get it in the hands of as many people as possible. It’ll be interesting to see if it takes on—I suspect it will take on a use in many different scenarios. Some of them will be purely creative. We’ll be proud to have it turn into something that a lot of people see as part of their gaming setup. That would be awesome.
One of the advantages of being at such a big company like Microsoft, if things take off and we have to make more of them, it’s not hard for us to do that. We have the resources to put millions of these things on the shelf if we need to.
The Xbox Adaptive Controller has been confirmed to be priced at $99.99. It will be available later this year via Microsoft Store and more details will be shared during the E3 2018 Briefing.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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