Tweet
One of the more irritating facets of game consoles' generational cycle is the scorched-earth approach to peripheral compatibility. Since the business began, platform holders and their partners in the peripheral business have used new console generations as an excuse to get gamers to shell out again for new controllers and other accessories they've already bought by ensuring older models won't work with the new console hardware. It is, and has always been, a bit of a racket.This is particularly aggravating - and expensive - when it comes steering wheels for racing games. These are complicated and very expensive pieces of kit; a well-built force-feedback wheel with pedals and a shifter will set you back several hundred pounds. If you really enjoy racing games, it's a good investment, but if you have to replace the whole thing - or at least the steering wheel base, the most expensive component - every four or five years, it becomes prohibitively expensive. What makes it doubly annoying is that most 'obsolete' console wheels will continue to work with contemporary PC games long into the next generation.
(Wes investigated this issue back at the start of the console generation, and found that the new consoles' requirement for security chips in all peripherals was behind it - but that wasn't quite the whole story.)
Read more…
More...