Game Stooge

GDC ’10: Sony Hopes Wii Owners Move To PS3

• Scribbled on March 11th, 2010 by Jordan Lund
• Filed in Casual Gaming, GDC, Hardware Peripherals, Move, Sony PlayStation 3

At the Game Developers Conference today Sony lifted the kimono – well, partially lifted – off their new motion controller – freshly named PlayStation Move.

The Move is a motion controller designed to work in conjunction with the Playstation Eye camera. The camera tracks the glowing ball on the top of the controller, and the Playstation 3 uses that information, along with gyroscopic feedback from within the controller, to determine where it is in real-space and turns that into in-game action.

The controller itself is a simple affair, featuring the traditional Playstation buttons on the front in addition to a “Move” button (marked with a stylized “A” for “Arc”, which is what the Move was originally to be called until Sony couldn’t secure the Arc trademark) and the Playstation home menu button. There is a Start and Select button embedded in the right and left hand sides and a trigger on the under-side. Sony states that it will also support vibration features a la the Dual Shock.

The ball on top looks somewhat goofy, but it does something interesting as well. One of the promo shots shows the Move in multiple colors.

My initial thought was that it would come in multiple colors for multi-player but that’s not the case at all; you’d have everyone fighting over the “good color” controller. Instead, the color is generated internally and is chosen to contrast with the background being picked up by the Playstation Eye. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the wall in your game room is painted blue. Having a blue orb on the end of your Move would make it hard for the Playstation Eye to track it. Changing the color from blue to magenta solves that problem right away.

Complimenting the Move controller is what Sony calls the “Sub-Controller” and it it acts, wirelessly, much in the same way as the Wii Nunchuck controller with a few key differences. Whereas the Wii Nunchuck sports an internal gyroscope, an analog stick and a shoulder button and trigger, the Move sub-controller is simultaneously more evolved and less involved. There is no motion sensing going on in the sub-controller at all, which means for double-fisted games such as boxing or sword/shield combat you will need to use two Move controllers. At the same time, though, it has an analog stick a D-pad, shoulder button and trigger and X and O buttons along with the ubiquitous Playstation button to access the main menu.

There are just two things missing from Sony’s presentation: Cost and support.

Ever since the launch of the Playstation 3, Sony has taken the approach that people will pay more for a quality product. The problem is that they have been proven wrong time and time again, from the poor sales of the PS3 to the poor sales of the PSP Go! This could be the reason they’re a little cagey when it comes time to talk Move pricing. The Starter Package will include a Playstation Eye, a Move controller and a game. For folks who already own a Playstation Eye (or if you’re one of the 4 people who bought Eye of Judgment) the Move controller will also be sold separately. Considering the Playstation Eye sells separately for $40 and appears in game bundles for $60 to $70 (the higher price point was the launch price for Eye of Judgment) Sony is going to be hard pressed to put the Move Starter Kit at less than $100. Add to that the fact that some games will require a minimum of two Move controllers for double-handed motion sensing and the price jumps up again.

The other issue facing both Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Natal is the issue of developer support. I, personally, love the idea of getting adult oriented motion sensing games as opposed to the junk targeted at 10 year olds that now appears on the Wii, but add-ons that appear late in a consoles life have a history of very little support.

The Eye Toy, Sony’s last generation camera for the Playstation 2 and rudimentary step towards motion control, only ever generated 19 games that required the device and the vast majority of them really weren’t worth playing. A further 36 titles had an “Eye Toy Enhanced” mode, but weren’t really designed for play with the Eye Toy. Again, most of them weren’t worth playing with any kind of controller.

So far a handful of Move games have been announced:

• Dukes (fighting game)
• Move Party (working title)
• The Shoot (shooting game?)
• Slider (fighting game)
• Sports Champions (working title)
• TV Superstars

Sure, consoles have launched with a weaker list of titles and the list of games will only grow, 20 titles are expected in 2010, but how far they grow though is going to depend on sales. Even though Sony is touting 36 third party developers on board for the project, that can and will drop if sales don’t match expectations. Long time gamers will remember 3DO bragging about having 300 developers on board and we all know how that turned out.

Of this list the only one that looks like it could be a sure seller is Sports Champions, which takes events similar to the proven Wii seller Wii Sports Resort and casts them in true high definition graphics.

The gold standard for console add-ons was the much-maligned Sega CD attachment for the Sega Genesis. While uninformed critics unfairly group it with the failed Sega 32X, the Sega CD was the single most successful console add on ever made, reaching sales around 6 million units and a library of over 200 games (the Wii Fit and Guitar Hero have sold more, but how many games use the hardware?). This is the finish line that both Sony and Microsoft should be reaching for. If either the Move or Natal end up with middling sales and 20 or 30 games they will be considered failures.

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