PC gamers may not be able to lord their preferred control scheme over their console brethren for much longer. Microsoft is promising that Xbox One developers will be able to easily integrate mouse and keyboard controls for their console games in a matter of months.

"Truthfully in our dev kit modes now keyboard works, mouse support is a little bit further away," Microsoft's Phil Spencer said in an interview with PCGamesN. "I say it because I know it’s not years away, it’s more like months away, but we don’t have an exact date yet."

Based on the quote, it's hard to say if that means full keyboard-and-mouse Xbox One games are just months away from market or if that's just when developers will be able to start work on adding such support for future games. Either way, it's a clear sign that Microsoft is speeding along in bridging gaming's decades-long PC-vs-console control scheme gap.

Spencer also tied the new control options in with Microsoft's recently announced Play Anywhere initiative, which lets users buy certain games once and play them on either the Xbox One or a Windows 10 PC. "When we enable PC and mouse on console, it’ll be interesting to see how many of those creators think about running their PC and mouse-only game on console, and then this idea of Play Anywhere might get even more interesting for those guys," Spencer said.

The Xbox One actually launched with limited keyboard support in some of its apps—we exploited that feature to test the box's potential as a work machine years ago. But this sounds like a much more robust plan to fully integrate a mouse and keyboard option into the core of the system's gaming functions (potentially for UWP apps as well ).

The new control options could be important for Microsoft's recent focus on cross-platform play between PCs and the Xbox One. Developers we speak to say many types of competitive games (such as first-person shooters) would be massively unbalanced if console players with controllers went up against PC players with mice. Offering the full keyboard and mouse controls to the console players could be one way to fix this potential imbalance.