Why Can't Motion and Rumble Get Along?

LifesBlood writes to mention coverage on GameDaily of a contentious controller-related issue. Kaz Hirai, SCEA's president, is claiming there is no rumble in the SIXAXIS controller because of prohibitive cost issues. President of Immersion Corporation Victor Veigas, on the other hand, disagrees. As the company holding the haptic controller rumble patent, he says that the technology could be included for a very reasonable price. From his statements: "If you remember, the day after they announced they were going to take vibration out of their controller I said that we'd be happy to work with them to solve the technical problem, and our engineers in less than a day had come up with three solutions; one is filtering and the other is processing and neither one is incrementally an increase in the cost. Both are using software to filter out the different commands--tilt vs. vibration--so that both can work side by side, and neither solution will add an increase to the cost of the system... We knew how to technically solve their problems and now we know how to do it without adding any incremental cost."

Sixaxis

[MeanderingMind]

There have been arguments concerning the "Sony just threw this together" controller stating that Sony had a patent for the tilting technology in the controller many, many years ago. The argument is that Sony couldn't have just copied Nintendo because they had the technology for the controller so long in advance and the functions of the two companies' controllers are vastly different.

For a while, I was willing to accept that argument. I didn't agree with it, my own feeling from watching the Sony E3 conference being that Sony was trying to take some wind out of Nintendo's sails, but I didn't consider it worthwhile to argue against.

However, the shenanigans involving the rumble feature suit and its sudden removal shortly thereafter, while circumstancial, only reinforce the perception that Sony's version of events isn't what they say it is.

I'm not compelled to believe that Sony actually had planned the Sixaxis controller well in advance when it unnecessarily removed a previous key feature, and seemingly mimicked Nintendo's controller. It doesn't help that Sony waffled about what online service they'd have, giving the perception they were only doing it to be able to say, "We have internet gaming too" at Microsoft. It really doesn't help that after ridiculing Microsoft's two separate packages Sony did the same thing. They say they "Don't care" about Microsoft and Nintendo, but all of the circumstances and coincidences tell a different story.

I'm not against the Sixaxis controller and I know a lot of people who dislike rumble anyway. What I am against is being treated like an idiot (regardless of whether I am or not), as most self-respecting people are. The whole deal feels like Sony is trying to pull a fast one, and that's a bad feeling. Were it just a couple of things that felt this way I wouldn't care so much. However, when everything that comes straight from the horse's mouth breathes of contempt for me and my intelligence, and only smells of greed for my dollars...

I wish Sony well, I just wish they could do something to restore my faith that they're honest.

Re:Strategic feature removal

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to let you in on a little secret:

The Wiimote costs a lot more to produce than the PS3 controller, because the Wiimote has more technology (3 Axis accelorometer, 3 axis gyroscope, 3d-position detection, IR/UV sensor, Rumble, Speaker, Wireless interface, Wired add-on interface, etc.) and Retailers have the same mark-up on both controllers; so yes Sony is cutting back features to increase their margin.

The question is why did Sony drop the Rumble feature (which has some value in a gaming system) yet retain the Blu-Ray player which greatly increases the cost of the system and offers very little benefit to gameplay (nothing that couldn't be made up by printing a second disk).

Re:Bad sportsmanship

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"So Immersion Corporation, bitter that they didn't get the contract to design the PS3 controller and sensing an opportunity to gain press, responds by badmouthing Sony. Real professional."

Bitter that they didn't get the contract, or bitter because Sony blamed their technology over reasons that were correctable?

Sony should just have said "we wanted to keep costs down."

Re:Strategic feature removal

[twistedsymphony]

IIRC the only multi disc PS2 titles were on two single layer DVD5 discs because early PS2 units had problems reading information on the 2nd layer of DVD9s. I can't think of any multi disc Xbox 1 games... and actually there were only 3 Xbox 1 games that required the 2nd layer after you got rid of game demos/videos and other unnecessary crap. Jade Empire, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, and Rally Sport Challange 2 all spilled over onto the 2nd layer. Jade empire and RSC2 only spilled over by less then a gig, and MGS2 Substance on the PS2 was 2 discs with the 2nd disc includeing specail feature and behind the seens stuff, for the Xbox Version they squeezed it all onto one disc but it could have easily been two single layer discs without any kind of disc swapping or removing from the gameplay.

There were only a small handful of GC games that used more then one disc, though I think it's important to note that the GC discs were ONLY single layer and held about 1.4GB of data... essentially 2 CDs. Meaning that the LARGEST of the GC games were about the same size as the largest PS1 and Saturn games.

Lets not forget that with new codecs for audio and video those elements are taking up a fraction of the space. Also there is new texture compression [ps3fanboy.com] that apprently reduces texture sizes up to 70% without quality loss. It would be interesting to see how the disc size requirments would change for a game like Oblivion had that tech been availble when it was first released. Apparently it's being used on some upcoming XBLA games that are using the U3 engine for fully featured games under 50MB.