Good news for those of you who want to play using form and functionality of the Xbox One controller, but haven’t made the jump over to the new Windows 10 operating system. If for some reason you bought the newest wireless controller adapter for the Xbox One controllers, you can now use it on Windows 7 and 8.1 equipped systems.
Announced via Microsoft’s Larry Hryb via his Twitter, it would appear the added functionality was added to the wireless adapter just today. Previously, this adapter only worked for systems that had been upgraded to Windows 10, but not all players want to make the upgrade for one reason or another. This additional backwards compatibility will come as a relief to them.
In addition to Windows 10, starting today Xbox Wireless Adapter now supports Windows 7 & 8.1 https://t.co/f4NMTw9PhN pic.twitter.com/K4rFPM2ktm
— Larry Hryb (@majornelson) December 10, 2015There are plenty of gamepads on the market that are debatably better than the Xbox controllers, but the ability to use the controllers to play games on Steam or other clients has always provided enjoyable dual function to owners of Xbox Ones and PCs. It’s nice to see that even though Microsoft is in a constant mode of moving forward, they’re not going to leave players that don’t want to go all-in on Windows 10 in the dust just yet.
The wireless adapters and Xbox controllers are both available at most electronics retailers, and directly from the Microsoft Xbox store.
