Xbox's Phil Spencer showed up as a special guest on the Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 81 on Youtube on Wednesday. In it, he shared some nice insights on the future of Xbox and Microsoft products. One of the products talked about during the podcast is the Xbox Controller.

Over the past few video game generations, Xbox has been hailed as the leader in game controllers. Their Xbox Elite Wireless Controller was the paragon of controllers in the video gaming industry. However, during the ninth generation of consoles, PlayStation's DualSense Controller came out as the more innovative controller using cutting-edge technology. Xbox seems to be playing catch up, with their Xbox Series X/S controller feeling more of the same as its previous iterations.

Thankfully, Microsoft has the humility to admit when they're behind in something. In the podcast, Phil Spencer was asked about Xbox hardware plans. Phil Spencer says: “There’s probably some work that we’ll do on the controller. I think Sony’s done a nice job with their controller and we kind of look at some of that and there are things that we should go do.”

Speaking specifically of the DualSense controller points us towards the direction that Xbox will be taking. It seems like Microsoft has it in their mind to implement haptic motors and adaptive triggers on their own controllers. If successful, this could mean PC games could make use of these controller features as well. That'd be really great for PC gamers.

Picking up on the innovations of your competitors is a great skill to have in the video game industry. The Xbox won't be the first one to take a page off the book of their competitors. Today's gamepads' design, for example, could trace back its heritage to Nintendo's NES controllers.