The poor, maligned PC as a viable gaming machine has taken quite a few backseats lately to consoles as lead development platforms. Games like Skyrim and RAGE both boasted interfaces clearly designed with controller support as their focus, leaving PC gamers to either mod the game to make it more mouse-friendly or turn off the defaultly-on controller support and button prompts, respectively. Other games, the Flatout series for instance, abandon all mouse support and force the player to plunk his greasy meat hooks down on the arrow keys if he doesn’t have a controller at the ready.
Meanwhile, members of the enthusiast games press have been perfectly happy to dongle-up their 360 controllers to their PCs and plug away, seemingly because they could. Video reviews and commentaries on popular sights such as GiantBomb or IGN would start with the host declaring that they were using an Xbox 360 controller simply because it seemed that’s how the game worked “best.” Given the popularity of this type of control, one has to then assume that these units must be available for purchase everywhere.
Except they’re not. In fact, Microsoft announced a long time ago that they were discontinuing manufacture of the wireless receiver for PC. In what few outlets still carry them, it’s almost exclusively offered with the purchase of an entirely new controller, which is no small purchase at roughly sixty dollars, though these days they can often be found on sale for around forty. The only other comparable option is the wired 360 controller, which can be found on Amazon but very rarely in the wild.
There is, however, still a market for the dongle product. Knock-off 360 controller receivers abound, some of them often pushed as official Microsoft products, which they are not. A keen eye will notice that 95% of them say XBOX360 on the top of the product (image above), however this is a device used exclusively for anything BUT an Xbox 360, which has support for its wireless controllers built in. Actual MS licensed dongles will say only “Microsoft” on them because they are for use on a PC.
Likely, some manufacturing company in the Eastern Hemisphere decided to keep the giant product-making robots running even when Microsoft put the kibosh on any more units in their own name. Rather than these manufacturers face the cost of retooling for a different product and soliciting new companies to use them as a maker of their goods, they just kept churning the little dongles out and selling them as knock-offs at knock-off prices.  On the upside, people can still nab one easily through all the various importers that sell through Amazon and other retailers. On the downside, installation is not as straightforward as you  might think.
I recently ordered one from Amazon that had high reviews and even came with a driver installation disc, which only gave me an error when I tried to select the driver from it. I had done my homework, however, and knew their were specific instructions in the User Reviews of the product I’d selected that told how to actually get it to work. The problem is, there were multiple sets of instructions, all of which were different.
The first told me to update the driver and select something that I didn’t even have as an option. The second told me to install Microsoft’s software for the controller detection interface (visually similar to that on 360). The software worked, but the controller still wouldn’t so much as pair with the dongle, so apparently the driver itself did not. The third attempt had me going back and trying to update the driver directly, and this time the proper options were available (probably from installing the software in the second attempt?), and I was able to get it up and running. The key is that these dongles aren’t Microsoft Wireless Gaming Receivers, for which there is a driver that will supposedly make their controller detection software work all fancy-like and show up on your screen and everything. Nope. These dongles use the Microsoft Wired Gaming Controller driver, and there is no indication on screen when it’s working – it just gets to working when you set it up right. Â This leads me to believe there is no support for player two through four, but for myself as well as most other PC gamers, that’s not a big deal.
However, this was quite a bit of finagling, and I’m a finagler by hobby and trade. I proudly wear my “i void warranties” shirt whenever I’m at Radio Shack or second-hand stores looking for something to cannibalize for some hair-brained, Frankensteinian project. At no point was I intimidated by this process, but I kept thinking about how the average person, and even really the average gamer to a lesser extent would be completely lost as soon as you tell them to go into their Device Manager.
So MS got out of the game of directly supporting existent 360 controllers while the knock-offs require fooling your PC into thinking they’re something they’re not… and THAT is the primary way that game press chooses to play and review games.
I think it’s time for a rallying cry from PC gamers. The press is the first line of reaction and communication with game developers and are often even fast friends. It would appear that a wide, yet (let’s be honest) understandable, gap exists between the end users and those who make and review games. The intent of the games press, I’ve always assumed, is to inform the player by accurately representing them. In this one respect, however, I believe many of them have chosen that failing must be good enough.
