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GameInput Installation for PC with NuGet

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If you're using GameInput to build your PC game, you should install the Microsoft.GameInput NuGet package to prepare Visual Studio for development. Doing so will help ensure that your application targets a version of GameInput that provides compatibility going back to Windows 10 19H1 (May 2019 update).

We recommended the installation of the GameInput NuGet package even if you have already been using the Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) for Xbox development. Doing so will only update your Visual Studio PC build configuration and will not make any modifications to the Xbox/console GameInput build dependencies.

GameInput Redistributable

Although GameInput is supported out of the box on modern versions of Windows, PC games are required to incorporate the GameInput redistributable into their respective installers for maximum compatibility. Upon installation of the GameInput NuGet package, the GameInputRedist.msi installer is placed into the packages\Microsoft.GameInput.<version>\installer folder, which is usually found in your project's root folder.

Note

The GameInput redistributable is included in the NuGet package but is not automatically installed.

If you are working with a GDK PC title, please see the documentation regarding Custom Install Actions for more information.

During installation, the GameInput redistributable verifies that it will not result in a GameInput downgrade on the target system. While this does mean that your game may run on a PC with a newer version of GameInput installed than was used for development, the GameInput APIs will remain backwards compatible ensuring a consistent behavior going forward.