The thing is, over the past decade, third-party controllers have really stepped up. You can often get better quality, more durability, and stronger performance for half the price of first-party options. Meanwhile, controllers from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have become increasingly mediocre, expensive, fragile, and not particularly impressive across the board. What makes this especially noticeable with Nintendo is that they’re surprisingly open to third-party hardware. That openness ends up highlighting just how much better the alternatives are.


