First off, and this should come as no surprise, Insomniac has revealed that Resistance 3 will in fact have PS Move (and 3D) support, but also says that this wasn’t due to demands put in place by Sony but rather community demand.
This from the PS Blog:
“…today we are finally able reveal, due to overwhelming community demand, that Resistance 3 will support Stereoscopic 3DTV. Furthermore, those of you who are enjoying the precision of the PlayStation Move motion controller with your copies of Killzone 3 and the SOCOM 4 Beta will be delighted to know that Resistance 3 will also support PlayStation Move and the sharp shooter. After Killzone 3 launched, we heard a massive amount of positive feedback, and were inundated with requests to support both PlayStation Move and sharp shooter. So we’re glad to be able to finally confirm the news!
In other news, which is actually a week old at this point but I found it relevant to this discussion, Ken Levine of Irrational Games has said that the PS Move is not in BioShock Infinite’s future.
Why’s that? Take it away Ken via Play Magazine.
“I’d never want to throw in Move support just because it’s going to make some first party happy or because some marketing department wants it on the box because, at the end of the day, gamers know. Do you want to play BioShock and it’s like, ‘OK, do you want to harvest or save Little Sister? Waggle left to harvest, waggle right to save!’ You can have Move support on your box but people are going to know you’re cheating them.”
I realize Resistance and BioShock are two very different action games, but the perspective is an interesting one.
The last few weeks have seen a lot discussion on how focused game development has become on maximizing their return on investment. Soren Johnson’s story about Activision’s CFO declaring that StarCraft 2 “wasn’t worth it” and Bioware’s frank talk about recycling environments and bisexualizing all the romances because it saved production costs both come to mind.
I wonder what the return on investment is for adding Move support to a single-platform game like Resistance 3. Guerrilla Games poured a lot of time and effort into making sure the motion controls for Killzone 3 were as perfect as possible, all to satisfy…what, 5% of the installed user base?
Don’t get me wrong: I really like the Playstation Move. It combines the best features of the Kinect and Wii Motion Plus, and I’d dearly love to see it embraced by more top-tier games. It’s just that, in an era where game studios are scrutinizing development costs down to the last microtransaction, trying to perfect features that appeal only the tiniest percentage of hardcore fans seems counter-intuitive.
Whether or not you liked Heavy Rain, Sony demanded Move support, which meant the existing customers didn’t get the planned DLC. Less content more waggles. Hooray for consumers! So it appears to take quite a bit for developers to shoe-horn in.
It’s also very, very hard to believe anyone could be inundated with requests for Move support.