Consoles have used different wireless tech/protocols but mostly use bluetooth now. Bluetooth devices should be able to work on pc but may require extra hassle like non standard protocol and no official drivers if they weren’t intended to be used that way. For the ones that do work the main takeaway is no additional dongle if your system already has bluetooth, but there may be addititonal input latency.
2.4ghz is kinda silly naming because bluetooth and wifi are both 2.4ghz, though wifi also has 5ghz, but it usually refers to presumably proprietary protocol over 2.4ghz and uses a usb dongle. It will generally be faster/lower latency but that isn’t even guaranteed as the 2.4ghz mentioned never refers to any standard.
The latency difference will only be noticible to cats or birds or something unless the controller tries to pass the headset audio to the pc. Bluetooth audio has a noticable delay compared to most ‘2.4ghz’ options, particularly noticable in rhythm games, games with inputs timed to audio cues, voice chats where everyone else has low latency audio and fast internet, and probably other stuff I’m not personally into.
Deciding your controller comes down to a lot of things. If the means exist in your area, try as many as you can to determine your most comfortable size, shape and layout. Other than that you absolutely must do yourself a favour and get a controller with hall effect sticks. The console companies all love stick drift. Don’t be fooled by Sony’s replacable stick controller either, the sticks are always out of stock and if you can solder you can get a regular controller and swap to hall effect yourself, both sticks, when drift starts for like $5 CAD vs $25 for 1 that will eventually die in the same way.
But probably just don’t give m$ sony or nint your money since they all get drift and I have replaced the battery and charge circuit on 8 separate ps4 controllers and drifting sticks on so so many of every big3 console controller. 8bitdo has a few stick and trigger hall effect controllers which I can mostly recommend, I have the hall stick only version of the ultimate controller and several of their older regular stick controllers. They are noted for their very close replica feel of snes dpad and face buttons but the configuration and firmware update software was windows only last I checked. I also quite like retro fighters controllers but all of their hall effect options are on closed preorder pending fulfillment. There are other highly regarded non big3 brands that I haven’t tried that seem to have pretty solid feature set and build quality too.
The used market is also an option. Arrange for testing though, and pass or haggle on drift, charging problems, filth, etc. Ifixit teardown guides for swapping parts or just cleaning the shells and button caps in soapy water with a soft rag. Watch out for devices originally sold with ‘soft touch’/‘smooth grip’/etc finish as all of them have degraded and become sticky even unopened in box by now.
edit: actually im not even half way and I feel like every notable old game ever is on there at a huge discount, with some I am suspicious of with only the title to go off filling the space, except there is no space and its just packed. I need to sleep but I keep scrolling.
The witness 80% off working out to 10.89 irks me. significantly better games with more content are like 6 bucks. I guess when there are no achievements hinting at something being missed, you aren’t compelled to find and do the most bullshit timed challenge in any game I can remember, which increases its value… ?
disclaimer: I enjoyed the first 15-30 minutes or so of the witness then suffered through the slog of completing every last thing. Even my autistic friends that unintentionally did 100% speedruns didn’t like it which gave me the echo chamber I had desired the whole time playing.
even if I search ‘zoom platform’ its like the 7th result after zoom the video conferencing software. just the sad state of the internet these days. anyway I found it now and I’ll check it out after work.
unlike nearly every other company in existence in any industry, they actually earned their position. It would be nice if they gave a bigger cut to devs, sure, but literally nothing is stopping devs from going on multiple platforms. I am also more forgiving of that due to their contributions to linux gaming, especially now that windows is continuing to go bonkers even after they reached the point that I could no longer tolerate it.
I only buy off steam, gog, and itch.io for some indie stuff as the rest are a terrible experience. And there’s the other part, other platforms need to be good for anyone to want to use them, because nobody will leave steam for a worse platform unless gabe dies and the supposed fuckery prevention plan fails and they go corporate and get an EA approved ceo. Even then it would likely be a slow burn like twitter and reddit. gog and itch have the minimalist store covered so even that is a hurdle. Maybe epic execs can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and figure out how not to suck, then people might use them for more than just hoarding free games they will likely never play.
that’s good to hear. all of the existing ones are already in my backlog for if things at work ever go as planned ever again. I own #2 and can play the rest via family share… ‘family’
When I was younger and had more time to not worry about merely existing, I used to enjoy chasing the updates and trying to find every glitch and exploit and do as much silly shit as possible before patches went live.