Say goodbye to the Arc or Gem and hello to the PlayStation Move. Sony has revealed the official name for its motion controller, coming this fall in three forms - alone, with the PlayStation Eye, or bundled with a PS3.
The European trademark office spilled the beans a bit early, but that doesn't stop Sony from being excited about the PlayStation Move.
Speaking at Sony's GDC press conference, which we are liveblogging here, Sony's Peter Dille hyped up the Move, saying that "previous motion devices have used controller simply as pointer of mouse — ours becomes an extension of your body."
"We're approaching this like a virtual platform launch," Dille continued, explaining that the Move will be available by itself, with the PlayStation Eye, which it will work in conjunction with, and as part of a special PlayStation 3 bundle.
No concrete pricing details were given, but the bundle with the PlayStation Eye was said to run under $99.
Check out our liveblog for more on the PlayStation Move.
Wow, so they had "arc" and went with "move". Spectacular.
We pissing our pants yet?
-Negan
You got your shittin' pants on? Because you’re about to Shit. Your. Pants!
-Negan
He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.
-George Bernard Shaw
I'm amused by people who are a) offended they ripped off the Wii and b) try to explain how they didn't really. It was always going to be reused.
That said, I'm curious about the approaches taken by the different consoles here. Sony has a better track record working with casual gamers, but Natal looks more interesting.
Sony are clearly aiming firmly at the Wii crowd with Move. The advert is basically "The Wii ad from three years ago with black handles instead of white ones".
Natal is vastly the more interesting technology, since it's got IR and video cameras, and can do IR positioning so that it can detect depth and stuff without having a handle with a glowy ball on. It may, however, be at some price disadvantage because of that. (Though Move requires the Playstation Eye as well, which obviously not everyone will have).
I think the Playstation Move is a significantly easier thing to develop games for because it has buttons and a level of precision which just isn't going to be possible for Natal to achieve. That said I think the vast majority of the games for it are going to be generic soulless shit which epitomise the worst of the shovelware attitude which the Wii has seen. A lot of companies will port their shitty Wii games over to the PS3 but it will cost them because of the economics of developing on a "true next-gen" console and the difference between targetting a hardware platform that has 2-3 times the sales of the platform that they are targetting a subgroup who have bought an optional accessory for the PS3. The Move is a shameless marginally more advanced rip-off of the Wii controller, from what I've heard from industry people it actually has some pretty fundamental problems (not able to pick up on the ridiculous coloured ball in anything approaching daylight). It doesn't really anything new to the marketplace and I think it'll be a pretty difficult sale to existing PS3 owners and the only way they will be able to bump up the attachment rate is by doing dirt cheap bundles which will lose Sony more money than they usually do on hardware sales.
