Dedicated to all the buttons and sticks that betrayed me…

I have a review ready to go, but this week, I’m setting that aside for something part rant, and part ramble. I know, it’s something I haven’t done in a while, but it’s been bugging me for a while now.

I was in the middle of a game when my controller stopped working. Specifically it was the right bumper button, but this is my third controller in less than a year. The cost of playing games on my controllers is starting get higher than buying the games themselves. Maybe it’s slight hyperbole to only point to the controllers, as I did have to get a new gaming PC, but let’s just get to the point: controller makers are really starting to cut corners, leading to shoddy products that can’t do their one job.

Let’s start with the last decent controller I had, a G-Pad Thorium, which lasted me a decent six months of solid daily gaming. When that broke, I got a generic X-Box compatible because Amazon recommended it. That lasted three months, and like the G-Pad, the problem was analog stick drift. I went back to G-Pad, this time for a Helium. Three weeks later, the right trigger got mushy. I tried playing some games that didn’t need it, like platformers and card games, but then the left stick developed a drift after another month. Cue my next search on the web.

I asked online if there were any controllers that dealt with this issue better, and the internet answered “Hall effect controllers.” Instead of using mechanical spring-loaded sensors, hall effect controllers measure analog stick movement with magnets. So in theory, they would last longer, right? Weeeeeeellll…

Candidate one was an EasSMX wireless controller, again recommended by Amazon. The sticks felt solid, but almost as soon as I got it, I discovered that pressing the home button would open a browser leading to Yahoo. Others online reported similar issues, but no one could find a way to fix it. Part of the problem is that these controllers have no driver or app to customize buttons. (We will be returning to this in just a moment.)

But beyond that, almost immediately, I noticed that the D pad would randomly report a press on the up direction, even if I had the controller resting in my lap. So for instance in Borderlands games, my character would randomly point to an object and shout “Look at that!” because up is the ping command.

The other issue was, the triggers were hairpin sensitive. I could be chatting to a merchant in Skyrim, and then just randomly run him through with my sword. So the merchant goes running for their lives, and I’m chasing them like a sibling hoping to avoid a beating by yelling, “It was an accident! I didn’t mean it!” And now here’s the guards arresting me for attempted murder and throwing me in the dungeon AGAIN.

I did more research and got an 8BITDo Ultimate 2C because it had great reviews, and it even had some nifty “customizable buttons” on the top. Lies. Again, with no driver or app, Steam won’t even recognize the buttons exist, so it’s impossible to set them up in any game for extra functions.

But whatever, I’m ready to get back into my groove, and I really want to like the 8BitDo because it has nice face buttons, decently responsive triggers without being too sensitive, and some really nice stick covers that made them way less slippery than the uncovered sticks.

Except right off the bat, I noticed a lot of input lag. So much so that I had to install a special program to overclock the polling rate to overcome this very annoying handicap in all kinds of games where defeat can come off of one missed input. Adding to my many sudden deaths was a mystery key press that would bring up an on-screen keyboard and disable all analog stick input. Just around the edge of the keyboard, I could only watch as bosses and minions pummeled my poor character into oblivion again.

Then less than two months later, the right shoulder button stopped working right. If I wiggled it a bit, it might come back, or it might only work half the time. That would be the scan function in Hitman, the attack button in Dark Souls, the skill select button in Dragon’s Dogma, and the element select button in Ghostwire: Tokyo. It’s kind of important, you see.

I got annoyed and said, “Screw it, I’m getting a controller from Nacon. I know they won’t let me down.” Less than a week and a half later, the right bumper button pressed in, and never came back up. It happened right after a really hard boss battle, so there is that. Also, I still had the box and receipt, so I went back in to the store where I bought it to beg for a warranty replacement.

The new replacement feels okay, but then so did the one before, which brings me back to my main bone of contention: how is it that just a few years ago, I could own a controllers for one year without issues, and now I can’t eve get a solid month out of them? Or how does my original PS4 controller last a few years, and now I can’t get any one product to come even close to that kind of durability?

To be clear, I’m not gaming more now than I did in the past. I do play a lot of games that rely on the upper buttons, and most of the time, it’s those that fail, not the face buttons. But we live in an era of gaming where lots of game makers refuse to allow for button mapping. So if a button I vitally need to play the game dies, I can’t do anything until I get a new controller. At this point, I’m now down two controllers while playing the same game. I paid more for controllers than I did for the game itself. (Which to be fair, it was a free game from Epic Game store, but still.)

I don’t know, I’m just tired of corporations always cutting corners to make more money, charging me the same prices for progressively shittier products. When I was younger, enough people complaining to the right folks would lead to some kind of investigation or class action suit. But it seems everyone in the business world can fuck over their customers and suffer no repercussions.

More frustrating is that products I used in the past and knew were reliable are now firmly in the grasp of enshittification, and every attempt I make to find a better product ends in the same bitter disappointment.

I know, you could say, “Why didn’t you get the other controllers replaced under warranty?” The answer is, I already got burned once with my choice, so I didn’t want another lemon from the same vendor. But if even Nacon has decided to sell lemons, what am I to do?

I just want to play games, and while I admit my gaming hours are a bit above average, I shouldn’t have to keep replacing the most vital interface needed to play on a monthly basis. And no, I can’t do mouse and keyboard. Yes, I’ve tried to go back, and it leads to massive wrist pain just a few hours into any attempt. Like it or not, I’m firmly in the controller only camp for the rest of my (hopefully) long life.

I’ve got no answer, either, only the vague wish that someday, gaming companies would look at their dwindling fan base and say to themselves, “Hmmmm, maybe we should stop exploiting them.” Which is a long shot, but the alternative is, they all collapse and leave us with only the cheapest garbage to play on. I’m not looking forward to that, y’all.