BlackBerry 10 Gets Support for Wireless Gamepads – Shows Off What Devs Are Creating

For the last few months there has been a mysterious “Gamepad API” sitting on BlackBerry 10’s native roadmap. Now that it is launched BlackBerry is ready to peal off the mystery and show us what is possible. They just confirmed on the DevBlog that BlackBerry 10 offers developers support for the following hardware if they use the Gamepad API:

1. The SteelSeries Free.
2. The Gametel.
3. The Wii Remote.  Note that currently only the core buttons on the remote itself are supported – that means no attachments and no motion controls, just the D-Pad and other buttons.

BlackBerry has offered up some great instructions for developers to implement gamepad support on BlackBerry 10 since it is just an abstraction above the Bluetooth HID profile. Unity 4 is also getting gamepad support shortly so expect the games built on the Unity engine to add it! BlackBerry also plans on adding support for more game controllers as they come out and mapping the controls so don’t worry about future device support.

Check out some videos of the gamepad API below: