Ubisoft’s VandenBerghe: “Motion Controls Suck”

At GDC Europe, Ubisoft creative director Jason VandenBerghe gave a presentation on the promise and limitations of motion controls, stating that they needed to become a standard and multiplatform in order to make sales worthwhile.

“Motion control is profoundly different. It’s screwed up the entire industry! The most important feature is the absolute, utter lack of guard rails. This turns the human being holding the controller into the constraint, and this makes a designer’s life a living nightmare.”

Case in point, Red Steel 2. During their development phase, QA testers would go and tell them that their controller was fully functional while another half of the room would be complaining stating that the Wii Motion Plus doesn’t work. Attributing the game’s mediocre worldwide sales to being single-platform and the requirement of a Wii Motion Plus, “I isolated this factor called audience willingness. There is a small group of people that is willing to get up and move and exert themselves for fun … We had to ask ourselves: how many gamers are willing to move? I don’t know how many there are, but it’s no higher than 20 per cent. That’s actually probably optimistic.”

How can this problem be solved? According to him, it’s the universal availability of motion controls. “My recommendation to you is that you should ship on multiple platforms. Nobody will want you to. Sony won’t, Microsoft won’t, Nintendo won’t. But the market will… Many genres will remain unchanged, and some people will still not want to exert themselves. But if the hardware remains an add-on, motion control will remain niche.”

[source: Edge]