We’ve written extensively of the court case between Sony and Immersion and its potential impact on the peripherals business for the PS3. While we’ve been featured on Immersion’s own press site, we assure our readers that we have no affiliation or vested interests in the company. Right before GDC, this court battle came to a fruitful conclusion for both parties involved. Having lost the initial court case, and the subsequent appeal, Sony cut its loss and settled with Immersion, using the opportunity to ink a new licensing deal.
All in all, this proved to be a very positive move from a PR perspective, and cleared the path to the potential re-introduction of rumble support in future iteration of the SIXAXIS controller for the PS3. Shortly thereafter, an update for Gran Turismo HD was released which added force feedback support to steering wheels. Some heralded this as the first benefit of this deal, but it should be noted that force feedback in steering wheels was never affected by the previous court case. The steering wheels weren’t being manufactured by Sony, and therefore couldn’t fall foul due to Sony’s lack of licensing of Immersion’s technology.
We suspect that the force feedback update could have been done earlier, but was politically impossible until an agreement was struck with Immersion. Regardless, it’s another good PR move from Sony: silently release an update, and let the consumers rave about the new added support. Other updates have also re-added rumble support for PSOne and PS2 titles on older DualShock controllers.
Many have suspected that since the agreement, Sony will have been working on a new controller with rumble support. We can now confirm that this is the case. We’ve heard from two independent sources at Sony that they have been working on prototypes for several months. Officially, the corporate line is still “no comment”. Unofficially, Sony is facing some difficulties with battery life; i.e. Between the rumble and the wireless support, the batteries are draining too fast to be acceptable for consumers.
Incidentally, no mention of the rumble having an adverse affect on the motion sensitivity (as Sony PR claimed, but was refuted by Immersion).
The battery life issue is an engineering problem, and we have no doubt Sony will resolve it satisfactorily. The two main problems we predict are both of a PR nature:
- First, and this is less important, how do you release a rumble-supporting controller after the claims that rumble is not next-gen? It’s not a major problem because most consumers won’t care about this, even hard-core ones will be happy to see rumble re-introduced.
- Second, how do you bring this to the market without upsetting consumers who already own a PS3, and therefore rumble-less controllers? Sony should not offer the rumble controller as an option, it should become the new default controller. All the old controllers should be pulled off the shelves. A financially expensive, but positive PR move would be to offer all current consumers the opportunity to “upgrade” their controllers for free.
When this new controller gets released doesn’t really matter anymore. As soon as Sony has the hardware kinks worked out, and enough developer support they will release it. They should have had settled with Immersion 6 months before launch and avoided this entire mess. The cost of the settlement is but a mere drop in the overall development cost of the PS3. It is good to see Sony learn from their mistakes and try to rectify them, and hopefully they will learn to avoid making these mistakes altogether in the future.
I decided to buy a second controller as soon as they are available from Sony with rumble support. I don’t mind if it has a cable, because I don’t like to always watch if there is enough battery left.
Left by Xillem on June 15th, 2007