FECordeau said:
smart route buying a stake in immersion? absolutely. not only smart, extremely shrewd. ms knew it wasn't looking good for sony to win and capitalized. it was a win/win situation. settle the case and force sony to either strip rumble or end up paying fees to them, in part. kudos to ms as far as i'm concerned.
The Immersion fiasco struck me as an example of how corporate greed screws up things for consumers. 'Shrewd' or not, I can't stand the idea of one company buying into (or otherwise funding) another because they happen to be involved in a legal dispute with one of that company's competitors, so they can funnel their own resources into the legal battle and/or profit on the resolution. Competition between companies should benefit the consumer - ideally, they ought to be fighting for marketshare by trying to offer the best products at the lowest prices, not using the legal system to bleed potential competitors dry.
FECordeau said:
i wasn't as clear as i should have been, but the arrogance i spoke of was this little quote straight from the official sony pr released tonight: "Pursuant to the introduction of this new six-axis sensing system, the vibration feature that is currently available on DUALSHOCK and DUALSHOCK2 controllers for PlayStation and PlayStation2, will be removed from the new PS3 controller as vibration itself interferes with information detected from the sensor."
i thought it would be more clear that i was referring to this by saying nintendo had years to get both right, and sony can't? i guess i should have just quoted this in my first comment, but now which is it? arrogance, a bold-faced lie, or incompetence?
I still don't see where you get 'arrogance' from. Or 'incompetence' for that matter, unless Nintendo was equally incompetent when they designed the Wavebird. To be honest, I think they didn't want to be stuck paying Immersion (and by association, Microsoft), and considering Nintendo's efforts to popularize motion sensing tech in games, replacing the rumble with a tilt sensor probably seemed like it would be perceived as a fair tradeoff in the minds of gamers. Much like you praised MS for the business with Immersion,
I have to give kudos to Sony for not only finding something to include in place of rumble technology that adds something to gameplay and
won't involve paying royalties to a rival company on every unit sold, but coming up with a believable way to sell consumers on the situation. Lemons into lemonade. Though I'm sure the real reason this bothers you (and so many others here) is because they're 'copying Nintendo', that this wondrous idea that was going to propel Nintendo back to top-dog status in the videogame industry (which I seriously doubt was going to happen anyway, all wishful thinking aside) had been stolen by those perfidious Sony scoundrels.
