Why Titan’s Cheap Controller Is Actually A Fairly Common Practice – SlashGear

There are a few main reasons why game controllers are so prevalent in such important, life-or-death applications. For one thing, a wireless Xbox controller you can pick up from GameStop is a lot cheaper than a device designed from scratch by a government contractor like Lockheed Martin. The U.S. military can save a lot of money by using pre-built controllers and the cheap components inside, and it also means they’re inexpensive to replace and keep spares on hand. This also allows the engineers building new vehicles and weapons to focus on other aspects of their design, rather than the interface used to control these machines.

The modern Xbox and PS5 controllers didn’t arrive out of thin air. The button and joystick layouts, their primary uses, and the overall ergonomic design of these controllers have all evolved over several generations of consoles. The reason an Xbox Series X controller is so similar to an Xbox One, Xbox 360, and even original Xbox controller is because the layout for hand-eye coordination simply works, and less and less refinements have been needed.

As Retired U.S. Submarine Captain David Marquet explained on “The Dan LeBatard Show,” “There’s billions of dollars being spent in the gaming industry, and so they’re making advances in a lot of these areas, like the human-machine interface, faster than that’s going on in the military.” Everyone from militaries to medical industries to OceanGate can benefit from the time and money spent by companies like Microsoft and Sony into perfecting a controller.