Earlier today I made a comment along the lines of "Nintendo should go third party and maybe make controllers/peripherals", however as I sit here thinking I can not think of much that has stuck when it comes to alternative controllers for consoles. Though I don't think Nintendo has done anything particularly useful for controllers (the wii was nice but we are not all using wii remote style things to play games) since possibly the dpad we are assuming it would be necessary for them to make games. They had some nice enough ones after that (the SNES was good and the gamecube one sound I guess, classic controllers were not bad either).
I am not talking about third party controllers that try to be the originals (they are all awful and always have been) or marginal tweaks on them but actual different controllers/input methods. Even the device makers themselves struggle -- move and kinect were failures, and though I reckon MS abandoned the kinect 2 before it should have been (bundling it was the right move from where I sit if they even hoped to have it work, I don't know the loss/sales projections so I can't tell if they pulled the plug at the right time from a business sense) that has since failed as well.
As people pay the silly money for amiibos I imagine if they could get a controller down to around that price (£25-£30) and saying "all our games will be built with this in mind) it would still work. Equally the phone controller market still seems pretty fragmented and thus available for the taking.
Anyway back to controllers. You have your dance mats which do for dancing games well enough, flight sticks still exist and do OK there, I am not sure I can count skylanders connection station things, there was the drawing tablet that supposedly sunk thq but kind of made an impression prior to that, the amount of stuff that people flung against the wall for 16 bit and older consoles is fodder for endless videos for people that look at old gaming stuff, even the humble steering wheel more often than not ends up in attics, sheds, under beds, in cupboards, in charity shops, in car boot sales..., and I am now down to things like Steel Battalion which did for its game but not a lot more.
I am not talking about third party controllers that try to be the originals (they are all awful and always have been) or marginal tweaks on them but actual different controllers/input methods. Even the device makers themselves struggle -- move and kinect were failures, and though I reckon MS abandoned the kinect 2 before it should have been (bundling it was the right move from where I sit if they even hoped to have it work, I don't know the loss/sales projections so I can't tell if they pulled the plug at the right time from a business sense) that has since failed as well.
As people pay the silly money for amiibos I imagine if they could get a controller down to around that price (£25-£30) and saying "all our games will be built with this in mind) it would still work. Equally the phone controller market still seems pretty fragmented and thus available for the taking.
Anyway back to controllers. You have your dance mats which do for dancing games well enough, flight sticks still exist and do OK there, I am not sure I can count skylanders connection station things, there was the drawing tablet that supposedly sunk thq but kind of made an impression prior to that, the amount of stuff that people flung against the wall for 16 bit and older consoles is fodder for endless videos for people that look at old gaming stuff, even the humble steering wheel more often than not ends up in attics, sheds, under beds, in cupboards, in charity shops, in car boot sales..., and I am now down to things like Steel Battalion which did for its game but not a lot more.
