Sega sees "land grab" opportunity with new motion controllers
Company can leap ahead of rivals with new products for Sony's PS3 wand and Microsoft's Project Natal, says development boss
Sega has said that there's a real opportunity for the publisher to make a "land grab" in the newly emerging motion controller space, ahead of rival companies.
According to European development MD Gary Dunn, the company already has extensive gestural gaming experience through its success on Nintendo's Wii, which can quickly be built upon for new products for Sony's PlayStation 3 wand and Microsoft's Project Natal.
"Being the largest third-party publisher on Wii we obviously have good gestural experience so for us I can see an opportunity to get a land grab on some of our competitors by taking our head start in gestural gaming and evolving it," said Dunn in an exclusive interview published today.
"I was blown away by it, both systems offer us so many opportunities to do great things with videogames," said Dunn of the competing technology unveiled at E3 for the first time this year.
"I immediately now want to make another Virtua Tennis. There's so many games and possibilities. I want to go away and lock myself in a dark room with some of our cleverest chaps and see what we can do with it. We've got to look in different directions to almost throw history away and it requires a whole new way of thinking. We've got to ask what can we do with this, because completely different genres of games could open up."
Dunn sees two immediate opportunities – apply the motion technology to existing franchises and genres, or throw out the rule book and build products from scratch for the systems.
But he also noted that along with three home consoles comes three separate motion control technologies, increasing workload and requiring new development solutions.
"It's going to be an issue but it comes down to how we deal with it. It's too early to say what those issues might be.
"There are two possible routes. You can opt to design a system around commonality so you have efficiency when you grow out your game design across platforms, or you can develop a different development process for each system," he concluded.
The full interview with Gary Dunn, where he also expresses his interest in working on a game based on the 2012 Olympics, why the mature market is still open to Sega, and the companies crack team of development fixers, can be read here.