14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Sony has great plans for the new motion tracking controller, shaped like a wand, set to be released at some point during the spring of 2010. Far from seeing it as only an add-on that can offer some players a new way of controlling their experience, the company sees the new device, which has not yet received a marketable, catchy name, as a whole new “platform product,” in the words of Shuhei Yoshida, the boss of Sony Worldwide Studios.
Speaking to Gamasustra in an interview, Yoshida stated that “We are still in the very early days of motion control development. We have had talks with company management where we discussed whether we should approach as a peripheral or a platform, and we agree that this has huge potential - so we position this as a hardware platform.”
In time, most of the titles released for the PlayStation 3 will likely offer support for the new motion tracking wand but Sony is emphasizing that even on launch date, games such as LittleBigPlanet will get support for it through a patch while other publishers, like Konami with Resident Evil 5, might offer a revamped version of their titles for those interested in controlling gameplay through motion.
Yoshida is also adamant about the fact that the wand is not only a way to attract those who bought the Nintendo Wii and are more casual-oriented gamers, saying Sony works 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.”
It's not clear exactly when the new motion controller is released and whether Sony plans to bundle it in with the PlayStation 3 home console. We'll probably know more before the end of the year.