That Sony likes its new, unnamed motion controlling peripheral is obvious, given the prominent place the unfinished product had at E3 2009. SCE Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida indicated to Gamasutra that they see the PS3 motion controller as more than a mere peripheral.
"We are still in the very early days of motion control development," said Yoshida. "We have had talks with company management where we discussed whether we should approach [the motion controller] as a peripheral or a platform, and we agree that this has huge potential -- so we position this as a hardware platform."
"The initiative [for the motion controller] was from Worldwide Studios, but this has to be designed so that many different kinds of games from all publishers can participate in this hardware platform," Yoshida explained. "So it's not like in the case of SingStar, where the mic is designed to work with the SingStar games; we made a decision that this motion control is a platform product that has to work for a variety of products.
"We are very fortunate that Capcom and [producer Jun] Takeuchi-san has said that he wants to work on Resident Evil 5 for the motion controller because this is a different type of game than what we are developing," he continued. "[We're working] with many teams to try different types of games to be able to cover the different needs of different types of games. So we have some teams working on very casual games, and other teams working on core audience type of games."
Calling the controller a "platform" reminds us how Nintendo considers the Wii Balance Board to be a platform seperate from the Wii. The PS3 motion controller has a lot of potential, but we'd have to see some games working with it in order to make a more solid conclusion about its future.
