[magicalhippo]

I don't own a console, but I always imagined the motivation was partially to level the playing field for competitive multiplayer games.

I recall playing COD4 online (on PC) and someone had hooked up a controller with rapid-fire and was pwning the noobs, quite literally.

[seabass-labrax]

I strongly suspect that the reason is more to do with producing artificial scarcity of hardware so that they can continue their loss-leader pricing strategy. Typical Xbox controllers go for £50 new; that's a quarter of the price of the Xbox itself, yet all one gets is a piece of moulded plastic with a few buttons on it!

PS. COD4 is apparently set in 2011 - do players not have automatic weapons anyway?

[magicalhippo]

> that's a quarter of the price of the Xbox itself, yet all one gets is a piece of moulded plastic with a few buttons on it

While I agree that they probably are having a decent profit on accessories like controllers, electro-mechanical parts are surprisingly expensive in my experience. A good potentiometer or joystick can cost way more than the rest of the circuit that uses them.

> COD4 is apparently set in 2011 - do players not have automatic weapons anyway?

Sure, but with games being games, to make single-shot weapons interesting game designers usually make single-shot weapons more accurate and do more damage as a trade-off for their lack of automated fire. Of course with a rapid-fire controller you can get best of both worlds in that regard.

[klyrs]

I think it's a design mistake to allow single-shot weapons to fire as quickly as your input device allows.

[falcolas]

That is actually how Cassidy works in Overwatch - the tradeoff is the exceptionally small hit radius of the projectiles. But there are other games where your ability to hit buttons quickly matters. Fighting games, for example. The recent kerfuffle around Razer's snaptap keyboard (and the software version with "Null binds") have well demonstrated that technological advantages in the controllers bring advantages into the games as well.

[magicalhippo]

On the flip side, I've played games which ignored the "fire" input for N milliseconds after triggering. Works well to prevent the issues mentioned, but was highly annoying as I would frequently click just a millisecond or so too early, and miss the shot.