Xbox One Games With Keyboard And Mouse Support For Precision Beatdowns Arrive Shortly

Participants of the Xbox Insider program were recently treated to a Minecraft beta that added mouse and keyboard support to the mix. If you have been wondering when Microsoft will roll out official support for keyboards and mice to the Xbox One community at large, Microsoft still does not have a specific date to share, though Xbox Platform CVP Mike Ybarra did promise that it is coming soon.

"Keyboard and mouse support is definitely coming. We have to be very smart in how we do that. We'll leave it a lot up to developer choice. A lot of people tweet me and say 'you can't do this because of fairness,' and we understand that. We run two platforms; the Xbox platform, and the Windows platform," Ybarra explained during an Q&A session at PAX.
One of the things Microsoft will urge developers to consider is how adding mouse and keyboard support will affect multiplayer pools. With esports growing in popularity (with increasingly larger prizes at stake), this will become an important consideration. And even just in competitive gaming in general, Microsoft suspects that gamers will want the choice of playing with mouse and keyboard players or only others who use a controller.

"So you'll see our first games supporting keyboard and mouse soon," Ybarra added. "I can't announce what that is, but soon. And based on developer interest, they'll choose to do keyboard and mouse, or not."

We hope that the majority of developers do decide to support mouse and keyboard input. Consoles are becoming are more like PCs with each new generation, Xbox One and, presumably, Xbox One X included. But for gamers like myself, it is difficult to fully embrace console gaming because certain game genres are just better suited for mouse and keyboard control, such as first person shooters and real-time strategy games.