The xinput gamepad is a pervasive standard, with plenty of third party hardware implementations and wide software support across operating systems. Heck, even C

The xinput gamepad is a pervasive standard, with plenty of third party hardware implementations and wide software support across operating systems. Heck, even Chrome and Firefox have JS apis to access xbox controller input. Eventually it will be surpassed, but it's far more available and supported than whatever they were doing before, and its simple enough to be easy to continue to manufacture. Also, do we really think the military couldn't find someone to contract with to continue making them if they needed to? Knock offs are $20 on Amazon, they're very simple devices.