Very different from an IR controller though. The wiimote has an IR camera and the console looks for two static light points to triangulate a position, it doesn’t transmit anything to the console through IR.

If you’ve used an IR TV remote, you can imagine how bad an actual IR-connected controller would be. Needs a perfectly unobstructed line of sight to wherever the sensor is, can’t turn your controller too much or you’ll miss the sensor, might occasionally be subject to wrong input/light interferences…

One of the weirdest use of video game IR I know though : the 3DS had a IR port. It was used for almost nothing.

BUT. At some point Nintendo released the Circle pad pro. It’s a thing you clip on your 3DS to add a right stick and a pair of triggers.

It was not plugged into the console at all. It was just using the IR port which it was touching. Of course it didn’t have the reliability problems from remote IR, since it was basically shining an IR LED directly at its sensor with nothing in between. I guess they didn’t have a lot of options for communication ports, but still, using IR for communication between two devices that are in direct contact is weird.