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Rainbird on 17 July 2010
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RolStoppable said:
Rainbird said:

As twesterm said, Sony and Microsoft are trying to break out of their box. Time will tell if they'll be successful, but I think the control schemes they've come up with are something we're going to see more of in the coming generations.

I don't think they'll be locked down like you're predicting. They're certainly not suddenly going to jump to Nintendo levels of popularity in the expanded audience out of the blue, but I think they will expand into it eventually, whether it starts with games or other offerings.

EDIT: I forgot my actual point. I think Nintendo will remain in the lead, but both Microsoft and Sony will see satisfactory success as well, probably more so than right now.

How can you say that Sony is trying to break out of the box when we have a thread about Sony not giving a sh*t about Move?

But seriously, Move and Kinect are only peripherals, not much more than experiments. This becomes clear when you realize that Sony and Microsoft don't put their top development teams on games for these devices, aside from easy implementations of the likes of pointing and shooting in Killzone 3. Still, the reactions from their core audience show mostly hostility towards these peripherals. That's not going to get better if Sony or Microsoft dare to make something like Move or Kinect the standard controller for their next consoles.

I don't know about Microsoft's policies, but I know that Sony don't force their teams to do anything they don't want to do, and that shouldn't change for a peripheral. Sony provides the money and the developers get to knock themselves out with whatever they want to do. So Sony 1st party developers adopting the Move and 3D is purely of their own choice.

And how are Microsoft not putting their top developers on Kinect? Microsoft only owns Lionhead and Rare, and they are pretty busy with Kinect games (with only Fable 3 being the big game from them that doesn't require Kinect).

And anyway, at this point in the generation, Move and Kinect could never be anything but peripherals. If anything, Sony and Microsoft might be softening the blow so to speak, if they're planning to release their next generation of consoles with control schemes derived from Move and Kinect.

I think the reason so much of their core audiences are hostile towards motion gaming is because they percieve it to be about mini games and waggle. Sony are actually doing something about this, with games like Heavy Rain, SOCOM 4, Killzone 3, RE5:Gold and others; games for their core audience, enhanced with motion controls (though I suppose time will tell if it's really an enhancement). Sony's hardware might seem close to that of the Wii, but they're trying to distance themselves from the Wii through the software, unlike Microsoft, who have very different hardware but the software seems more like your stereotypical Wii game.

Regardless of the outcome this generation, I expect motion controls are here to stay, for all three companies, and I expect the next generation of consoles to launch with some sort of motion control schemes. Sony and Microsoft will certainly be mindful of their core audience and their "needs" though, so I wouldn't be surprised to see something like the fabled break-apart controller from Sony and Microsoft launching with both Kinect and a traditional control pad out of the box.