Microsoft’s new Xbox controller borrows great ideas from Stadia, Steam, and Sony

19.09.2023 - 21:17 / theverge.com / Sean Hollister / New / Sony

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

New Xbox for 2024! New hybrid Xbox for 2028! But can we just appreciate Microsoft’s leaked Sebile controller for a sec?

The $70 pad could arrive in 2024 chock-full of the best parts of Sony’s DualSense, Valve’s Steam Controller, Google Stadia, and — here’s hoping — 8BitDo.

Obviously, it’s taking the Sony DualSense’s “precision haptic feedback.”

Right, here’s hoping! It’s the thing I’m most excited about because it seriously does add a new dimension to some of Sony’s games, which just aren’t the same when you take it away.

Check out our DualSense X-ray below, versus this one of an Xbox pad, to see the difference in their haptic motors:

Note that some controllers have shipped with “precision” or “HD haptics” that didn’t have the impact, even if they technically featured linear actuators instead of old-school eccentric spinning weights like Xbox gamepads still do today. The Steam Controller had pretty iffy haptics, and the Nintendo Switch haptics aren’t DualSense-level...

What’s the good Steam Controller feature, then?

Would you believe Microsoft’s “haptics double as speakers” has already been done? This always makes me LOL:

The Steam Controller could genuinely do that. Heck, the Taptic Engine in your iPhone can technically do it, too.

But I’m also really hoping Microsoft puts a gyroscope in this thing, not just an accelerometer, so we can have the same gyro aiming revolution I’m experiencing on my Steam Deck and with Zelda on Switch. It’s so good for aiming bows.

What good could possibly have come from Google’s Stadia controller?

It’s the reason Sebile is such a big deal. Microsoft was internally positioning it as its first “Universal Wireless Controller,” theoretically capable of controlling Xbox across console, mobile, PC, and cloud.

The controller can do that because it connects directly to the cloud, documents show, in addition to Bluetooth and Xbox Wireless. Google Stadia pioneered direct-to-cloud by connecting the controller directly to your home Wi-Fi, and it let me seamlessly move between playing a game on my PC, TV, and phone. Here’s something I wrote in 2019 about Stadia and Destiny 2:

I fired up a session on the TV with the Stadia Controller while we were just blasting tiny minions, swapped to a desktop with a mouse and keyboard when I needed better aim for a boss fight, and seamlessly resumed the game on a smartphone before walking down the hall to grab a snack — all while playing with a colleague 5,000-plus miles