Almost a year ago, Phil Spencer, chief of Microsoft's Xbox branch, tweeted that mouse and keyboard support is not "far away" from the Xbox One. Now, speaking to PCGamesN, Spencer has not only reaffirmed the support for what was once among the biggest differences between PC and console, but also described it as being "months away."
Spencer was discussing the recent announcement of their Xbox Play Anywhere program, which would allow Xbox One games to be cross-played and cross-bought with PC games, which naturally means that more games will be ported from Xbox One to PC and vice versa. While PC gamers already have the option of using Xbox One controllers with their systems, Xbox One players on the other hand have thus far been limited to using keyboard controls for text input.
"Then take... League [of Legends]. Trying to take League and play it with a controller... or Dota... I don't know, maybe a designer's going to try and tackle that problem, but those seem like natural PC games to me," Spencer said. And it makes sense - high-level play with MOBAs like Dota or LoL are built so strongly around the use of mouse and keyboard that it's quite possibly an insurmountable challenge to translate that into a controller.
"When we enable PC and mouse on console it'll be interesting to see how many of those creators think about running their PC and mouse-only game on console, and then this idea of Play Anywhere might get even more interesting for those guys," Spencer went on to say.
Keyboard and mouse support on the Xbox One opens it up to a whole new set of games that have previously been the domain of PCs - MOBAs and RTSes may be encouraged to find a place on console, as they'd no longer have to be limited by the controllers with which Xbox One owners game. In addition, some very fast-paced FPS games could find themselves more popularity and easier playability on Xbox One.