The lines separating the Xbox One and the Windows PC are about to become even blurrier as Microsoft plans on bringing full mouse and keyboard support to the home console “soon.” Xbox CVP Mike Ybarra said as much during a Q&A session following a panel at PAX West this weekend when asked about the feature by a member of crowd. He didn’t get into specifics, but did stress that developers would decide how to implement it.
This is the full quote from Ybarra is response to the question about keyboard and mouse support:
Keyboard and mouse support is definitely coming. We have to be very smart in how we do that. We’ll leave it a lot to the developer choice.
So a lot of people, they tweet me and say “you can’t do this because of fairness,” and we understand that. We run two platforms: the Windows platform and the Xbox platform. And so, when we bring keyboard and mouse, we’ll coach developers to say: “Look, you’ve got to think about your multiplayer pools.” If you have a competitive game, people probably are going to want the choice to say “I’ll play with other keyboard and mouse people,” “I’ll play with only controller people,” or “you know what, I’ll play with any of those.”
So you’ll see our first games supporting keyboard and mouse soon. I can’t announce what that is, but soon. And then, based on developer interest, they’ll choose to do keyboard and mouse going forward. Or not.
points out that the Minecraft “Better Together” beta already supports keyboard and mouse controls, thanks to Universal Windows Platform APIs that work on all Windows 10 devices. It remains to be seen which other games will support the feature, but as long as developers are careful about allowing players to choose whether or not they want to play online with players who are using a keyboard and mouse (which are far more accurate than a controller, especially for shooters), it should be an exciting addition.
