Sports, Shooter, Family Games 'Critical' For PS3 Motion Control Success

Sony has yet to officially attach a name to its PlayStation 3 motion controller, but Sony Computer Entertainment America hardware marketing director John Koller is already foreshadowing where the upcoming peripheral needs to succeed. "In terms of the best types of games, I'd say that right now we're looking a real wide variety of genres that can utilize the technology," he said in an interview with GamePro. "I think the areas that are going to be really critical to our success will be family games, as well as shooters and sports games." Sony revealed its motion controller in June during E3. The system consists of a wand-like controller topped by a color-changing sphere, and a TV-mounted camera that measures the size of the sphere continually, in order to interpret movement in a 3D space. The controller is expected to launch sometime next year. Kollar, predictably, is confident that Sony's motion solution has the upper hand against the competing Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Project Natal. "[Shooters, family, and sports] are going to be the areas that will really define success, because they're areas that quite honestly, I think Project Natal and the Wii are going to have trouble matching, from a differentiation standpoint," he said. Sony has also said that it intends to focus on the core gamer market with its motion controller, as opposed to the Wii and Natal's primary approach, which is creating games for the mass market that use motion control as the foundation. But this doesn't mean that Sony will be ignoring the accessibility factor that can draw in new gamers who are intimidated by traditional game controllers. "We look at motion control as being that much more than what exists on the market. The Holy Grail of gaming is placing you as a consumer into the game physically. When we provide further details, people will see exactly where we're going, not only from a technological standpoint on the hardware, but also where the gameplay is transitioning. It's going to be a really exciting launch," Koller said.