I was reading today, Sony has a new patent for a buttonless controller. Everyone is already making the joke about it, But I think people are missing the factors on this one.

This thing at face value is going to make some gamers go oh look futuristic , Me I am looking at this thing and saying to myself – they are using this for an AD space. There is so much wrong with this controller. With no buttons it is an outright disaster for the disabled. Being capacitive is nothing new, the HTC touch had it and if that outs my age, I don’t care.

It uses a built in display to display the layout, while sony is not saying it out loud, Your EA game is now going to have Nike Advertising while you are trying to pick your next play in madden. Call of Duty will have a button for loot boxes just in range of an accidental purchase range. While this display looks to be a simple matrix display, it would not preclude the fact that they will give the player text advertisements just on the very edge of their visual range and would likely fall into the regulatory issues of subliminal advertising.

Here’s a test: put your hands on your controller right now, now look at your hand and tell me what your hand is doing. Its sitting at the ready position sitting lightly on those buttons, With sony’s patent controller you will now have to float your fingers because any twitch at all you are changing the resistance around that button and you are hitting a button without even trying to.

For people with nerve damage, you now have zero feedback to what you are doing. They should of taken a page from Nintendo’s playbook and had a split controller which takes the weight off your hands and improved on it, Hell if you wanted they could of stuck a screen on the thing that plays Noo-Noo from teletubbies and it still would of been an improvement over this buttonless design.

People with prosthetic fingers and hands.. good luck , suddenly either the servos in your prosthetic or changes in your magnetic field will suddenly have buttons inputs you never made. People with tremors will suddenly be all over the place and while the controller claims to be “accurate” you are now going through a translation layer which adds ms to button hits , so all old games with precise QTE will fail.

Further thinking, if they move forward with this controller, sony will move into dangerous territory , the first dev that decides to put an accessibility layout behind a microtransaction will run very fast into the wall of the ADA considering that prior hardware did not have this layer.

They also may be taking a page out of BMW’s playbook, “UNLOCK THE PRO LAYOUT NOW 0.99 Cents!” meaning with zero hardware changes they are increasing your cost per button touch. In the last 10 years Xbox has taken their controllers and have gone from 40$ to almost 65$ , Nintendo jacked up the cost of the joycons, and while the price has gone up functionality has not increased, sony sees a niche here and goes hey we are going to make this “futuristic” controller and its “Fully Changeable” but under the hood you are going to have some CFO who has never played a game in their life go “how can we monetize this?”

There is another layer that is interesting. What happens when a scammy 3rd party indie dev that is not above board finds a way to use the controllers and steals and streams all of the button presses back to a server. Now they have every button press you hit for the last 6 hours in your gaming experience and matches it out to a screen. They just stole your logins, every little thing you said, they found out your “gay” and are “afraid to out yourself to someone” its a security nightmare. your intercepted button presses on the controller to the onscreen keyboard just got mapped and days later you are trying to figure out a $399 charge to your credit card in some place you never visited.

But this controller feels like an april fools joke that is 4 months late. After sony’s disastrous announcement of they will not be moving forward with solid media you would think someone in marketing would be like “hey bob, this controller is just going to make the players mutiny”. In an irony, sony wants the innovation that nintendo hit with the Wii… and for what it is worth nintendo did it better, They did “how can we make this simple” Sony fails at this because “how can we make this AWESOME” with a bunch of interns jamming whatever the hell their cracked out monster energy high made them think in the moment.

This isn’t hardware innovation this is hardware subjugation. US Patent 12,533,573 B2 is written like 10 guys with ideas got bored with chatGPT and told it to make a patent. The capacitive button idea has a history, Creative labs you have anything to say about this?

My final word for this is , you are making a 3 camera , Glass device to last through the gaming experience. What parent is going to buy a controller that will last one game, not work right for a person who just came out of the swimming pool, an ADA nightmare , One controller throw and this thing is now glass bits on your floor and an injury hazard.

Attributions:
PS controller Patent.